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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



POSITIVE RELIGION 



ESSAYS, FRAGMENTS, AND HINTS 



POSITIVE RELIGION 



Essays, Fragments, and Hints 



BY 



JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN 

Author of " Hebrew Men and Times" " Christian History 

in its Three Great Periods? " Our Liberal 

Movement in Theology J* etc. 









We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen 

^v or 



>^OPYRl 






now 



BOSTON 

ROBERTS BROTHERS 

1801 






Copyright, 1891, 
By Joseph Henry Allen. 



John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



> 



TO THE READER. 

Who goeth forth and reapeth, bearing seed 
Of precious Truth, shall doubtless come again, 
Bringing his sheaves with joy. A purer Creed 
Shall bless the waiting hearts of brother men ; 
And thou, a Child of God, if faithful now, 
Shalt wear the Crown of Life upon thy brow. 

Ps. cxxvi. 6. 



PREFACE. 



T HAVE sometimes wished it were customary 
for persons quite unknown to fame, who, liv- 
ing quietly but thoughtfully in common ways, 
have sanely and happily passed the bourne of three- 
score years and ten, to mark that event by some 
word which might honestly tell the meaning of 
life as they have found it, and serve as their par- 
ticular legacy to the general thought. 

The motive is strengthened, and becomes even a 
sense of duty, when one's vocation has compelled 
him statedly, seriously, and often, to meet the real 
occasions of the inner life, and to interpret them 
as he may in their relation to the Supreme Order; 
especially if he has been forced by circumstances 
frequently to revise those judgments. There are 
certain crops which thrive best when they have 
been repeatedly and severely cut back in their 
early growth ; and it may happen, sometimes, that 
the harvest of the Word is one of these. The road 



Vlll PREFACE. 

one follows in life is not often so smooth as it 
looked at starting ; and the waymarks that seemed 
plain in the beginning call for many a correction 
before the journey is ended. He learns, not with- 
out a pang, to put away one thing after another 
that had seemed a part of his necessary outfit ; and 
he must take account, more soberly, but perhaps 
not less gratefully, of the things which remain. 
This world has not shaped itself by his hopes and 
dreams, but he has won a more even temper of se- 
renity in his clearer acquaintance with the exist- 
ing fact. And he finds, to his surprise perhaps, 
that life has not lost its . sacredness or its joy ; 
while its light is mellowed, and its horizon begins 
to grow grey with the dusk of evening. 

The pages which follow are, so far as the writer 
is conscious, absolutely faithful transcriptions of 
those phases of experience, or of the judgments 
upon them, to which he has been led in the course 
of the fifty years since this general line of thought 
became the occupation of his life. During these 
years he has taken an active part by voice or pen 
in nearly every public discussion, or controversy, 
that seemed to touch on religious theory or social 
ethics. In these same years he has enjoyed the 
near companionship of very many who have been 



PREFACE. IX 

eminent teachers of their generation, or have given 
the testimony of obedient, humble, and consecrated 
lives. In whatever he has written, he has sought 
to do justice to what he has found highest and best 
in this compan) r of witnesses, and to interpret 
with his utmost ability those lessons of life which 
their word or example has shed light upon. So 
far as he is aware, he has not attempted to prove, 
still less to controvert, a single proposition open 
to dispute : he has sought only to utter, as plainly 
as might be, the testimony which was his to give. 
The personal convictions, meanwhile, which alone 
would make that testimony worth his giving, he 
has not in the least attempted to disguise, any 
more than to conceal those parts of it that may 
be thought to represent incidents of his private 
experience. 

Respecting the significance of his title he may 
be allowed here to say a single word. The long 
habit of regarding Religion as a thing of opinion, 
of emotion, or of ceremony, has tended greatly to 
blind men to it as an element in their own experi- 
ence, or as a Force, mighty and even passionate, 
in the world's affairs. And it appears to him 
that any word however feebly spoken, or any 
hint however imperfectly conveyed, which recog- 



X PREFACE. 

nizes first of all that positive quality in it, — 
independent of party, race, age, or creed, — is a 
step towards the revival of it as a Power whole- 
some, invigorating, and inspiring, in the lives of 
men. 

J. H. A. 

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 
December 25, 1890. 



CONTENTS. 



PART I. — ESSAYS. 

PAGE 

I. How Religions Grow 3 

II. Religion as Experience 23 

III. What is a Revelation? ....... 40 

IV. The Miracle of Life ........ 58 

V. The Law of Justice 69 

VI. The Law of Sacrifice 86 

VII. A Religion of Fear 104 

VIII. A Religion of Trust . . 117 

IX. The Term "Agnostic" ........ 126 

X. The Name "God" 138 

XI. The Name "Christian" 151 

XII. The World-Religions 1 72 



PART II. — FRAGMENTS AND HINTS. 

Witness to the Truth 193 

A Nineteenth-Century Religion 197 

The Worship of Humanity . 203 

The Unpardonable Sin 210 

The Death of Jesus 212 

The Mystery of Pain 216 



Xll CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

At Sixty: A Xew-Year Letter 220 

The Question of a Future Life 224 

Hope, as an Anchor 230 

The Divine Judgment 234 

Pardon 237 

Stepping-Stones 241 

The Bright Side 244 

Going Forward 248 

Religion and Modern Life 251 



PART I. 



ESSAYS. 



POSITIVE RELIGION. 



HOW RELIGIONS GROW. 

" The "Word is a live seed " (<rir6pos). 

TTTHEN Professor Gray wrote that most charm- 
ing of text-books, "How Plants Grow," he 
gave us a hint of the way we are to follow in our 
study of the law of life in everything that lives. 
I will take that hint, then, in what I have to 
say about the growth of Religion. 

This we may here understand, without any fur- 
ther definition, to mean true religion, the higher 
life of the soul, apart from the rubbish of super- 
stition or the morbid growths of passion that have 
been entangled with it. 

The first point which I wish to note is this: 
That little book shows us how, when the seed of 
any common plant falls into the ground, it swells 
in time, with moisture and heat, and then begins 
to unfold, from the very start, in two opposite di- 
rections : it sends down the tiny fibres of the root 
to grasp at particles of the earth which it feeds 
upon ; and by the same effort it throws up a slen- 
der stem, with its pale-green rudiments of leaves, 



4 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

into the air and sunshine, which give it vigour, 
colour, and the capacity of continued growth. 
Now "the seed is the Word." And I shall ask 
you to observe the analogy in the law of life when 
we speak of Religion, which unfolds from its ear- 
liest germ in two directions, not in one only: it 
lays hold upon the earth below with the firm roots 
of love and duty; it flowers out in the upper at- 
mosphere of our life, in hope, joy, trust, aspira- 
tion, and peace. In each of these two directions 
it appears as the soul's higher or ideal life; and 
both are equally essential to its completeness. 
Thus, in our study of its growth, we have to keep 
alike in view its two great departments, — Ethics, 
or duty, and Piety, or worship. 

For one moment more I will call back your at- 
tention to the analogy we started with. When we 
come to look more closely or more broadly at the 
life of plants, we find that there are three points 
of view, or objects of study, which we must attend 
to, to make our plan complete, — several others, 
perhaps, but at any rate these three : first, the ori- 
gin of that life ; second, its development, or unfold- 
ing; in the particular plant or kind; third, its 
grouping, or classification by genus and species, 
showing the relations, dependences, and conflicts, of 
many different kinds. To apply this to the topic 
before us, we find. then, that we have three ques- 
tions to answer instead of one : namely, 1. How 
Religion grows ; 2. How a Religion grows ; 3. How 
Religions grow. Of these the first seems to me 
by far the most important and interesting, and 



HOW RELIGIONS GROW. 5 

by far the most neglected at the present day. 
So I need be the less troubled if I should seem to 
neglect, in comparison, either of the others. 

To go back once more to the analogy of vegetable 
life. Of the origin of this, I do not know that any 
other account can be given than that it appears 
to be spontaneous and universal wherever there are 
conditions fit for it. Not only it is so, in amazing 
constancy and variety, on all parts of the earth's 
surface we know, but some astronomers have seen, 
or thought they saw, pale-green streaks on the face 
of the moon, from which they at once inferred a 
remnant of atmosphere, water, and vegetation.* 
Now we need not trouble ourselves in the least 
about any theories of its origin, — whether germ- 
theories, or theories of chemical evolution, or the- 
ories of special creation. For our purpose, one 
is as good as another ; nay, for anything we know, 
they may all, in our higher philosophy, come to 
the same thing. All we have to do is to look at 
the fact, to understand it as well as we can, and to 
see what it may possibly lead to in our study of 
the higher life. For, as soon as we go far enough 
back, our definitions run into one another. All 
we can say is, that life flows immediately, by any 
open channel, from the Universal Source of life; 
and in saying this we are just where we were at 
the beginning, only with the advantage of seeing 
more clearly what our words mean. 

To apply this now to our question, How Religion 
grows. You observe that I wish to keep it dis- 

* See Langley's " New Astronomy/' p. 148. 



6 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

tinctly in view that the Source of Life — no matter 
what we assume it to be — is here, now, and al- 
ways, acting by direct contact or pressure, under 
laws always uniform and the same. This thought 
is what is called, religiously, the thought of "the 
Immanent God," and is very characteristic of 
the religious dialect of the day. I do not wish 
to define it, still less to defend it, but only 
to see what it leads to in the treatment of my 
subject. 

That leading surely is that we should study the 
growth of religion on the spot, in the phenomena 
which are, or may be, familiar to us in the obser- 
vation of human life in our own day and (as it 
were) at our very side, — nay, in the hints and ex- 
periences that may happen to any one of us to-day. 
Now I observe that this is very often not the way 
taken, even by those to whom it would seem to 
lie openest and nearest. They will speak, per- 
haps, of our being always in the presence of " an 
Eternal and Omnipresent Energy from which all 
things proceed," and say that religion is, at bot- 
tom, the emotion with which we contemplate that 
Energy; but, as soon as they come to speak of the 
origin of religion, and its phenomena, they take 
us ten thousand years back, or into the customs of 
some barbarous tribe ten thousand miles away, 
and give us some ghost-theory, or dream-theory, 
some talk of fetish-worship, or star-worship, at 
an enormous distance from anything that touches 
us in our own lives. This may be a very curious 
thing to know, and a very useful thing to do, but 



HOW RELIGIONS GROW. 7 

it is not at all the thing that concerns us now. If 
the belief in an " Immanent God " is good for any- 
thing, or if the theory of an " Eternal and Omni- 
present Energy " is good for anything, it seems to 
me that it is good for exactly this : to help us un- 
derstand the facts of the religious life just as they 
are, in us and about us, now ; not the supposed be- 
liefs of savages, and not the real or imaginary 
notions and practices interpreted to us by painful 
antiquarian study. In the view of it that we are 
to take, Religion, where it exists at all, is full as 
fresh and original a thing, and quite as near to 
the Eternal Source of Life now and here, as it was 
in the days of the cave-dwellers, or the sun-wor- 
shippers, or those feeble folk whose imaginations 
ran on ghosts and dreams. 

Again, I wish to keep clear as I can of theories, 
and look to facts. A hundred years ago there 
was a cheap and easy notion, very commonly pro- 
fessed, that religion was devised by the craft of 
priesthoods, with intent to deceive, and to serve 
their private ends; but we have got far beyond 
that now. The past century has been very fruitful 
in theories which explain some one feature, but 
do not begin to embrace the whole. We need not 
dwell long on any of them. If Schleiermacher 
says that the origin of religion in the soul is " the 
sense of our dependence," I reply, That may be 
very true, but it is not the whole truth ; for reli- 
gion starts quite as often with a sentiment of en- 
thusiasm, of courage, elation, gratitude, or hope. 
If Charming, or some disciple of Channing, says 



8 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

that its origin is in aspiration to the Divine and 
Holy, I reply that that may be; but it may 
equally begin from a sense of sympathy, contri- 
tion, or despondency. If I am told that it essen- 
tially consists in "the effort of man to perfect 
himself, " I reply that so it is no doubt in many an 
intelligent and generous soul ; but I remember too, 
as characteristic of it, a temper subdued to the 
most abject servility, a self-discipline carried to 
the austerest practice of ascetics, which degrades 
far more than it ennobles, yet by common consent 
is included in the name. 

Then, too, we have been very much accustomed 
to hear religion described, or religions classified, as 
consisting of people's opinions or beliefs about the 
universe, duty, and destiny. Thus Dr. Martineau, 
at the beginning of his luminous and massive 
"Study of Religion," defines it as "belief in an 
ever-living God, that is, a Divine mind and will 
ruling the universe and holding moral relations 
with mankind, " — which last, as he afterwards ex- 
plains, includes belief in personal immortality 
and a future state of rewards and punishments. 
This is an accurate account of the fundamental 
doctrines of that form of the Christian religion 
which he has in view ; but it gives us a definition 
not much more adequate for our present object 
than the sentiment or emotion religion is some- 
times taken for, to explain how it enters as an 
actual experience into human life. 

Still, I cannot get along with my argument 
any more than those authors whom I have quoted, 



HOW RELIGIONS GROW. 9 

without narrowing my topic down by some term 
or phrase that will hint to us the real nature 
of that experience we have to deal with. I will 
begin, then, not by attempting a new definition 
of my own, in which I might be no more for- 
tunate than the others, but by putting into words, 
as best I can, what seems to me the real origin of 
religion, considered as a fact in the experience of 
life. You may find my words technical, and even 
a little strange, considering the poverty of the re- 
ligious dialect which most of us employ ; but they 
are the only ones I can think of that appear accu- 
rately to describe the fact. I say, then, that reli- 
gion enters as an element into the experience of a 
man's life when he finds himself, in whatever 
way, face to face with the Eternal; and in that same 
hour knows that the deepest law and highest wel- 
fare of his life are somehow enfolded in it. For 
the nature of the experience is such that both 
these impressions come together. 

Here, you see, I have to use a figure of speech, 
instead of the accurate terms of science ; because 
our first business is to recognize the fact, and till 
we have done this we have no business to analyze 
or define it. Still, I think the general sense of 
what I mean will be plain enough. For you will 
observe that I offer no theories about it. I take 
nothing for granted as to the existence of an " eter- 
nal world " outside of us, but speak only of a par 
ticular element or phase of our own experience ; I 
say " face to face with the Eternal, " just as I would 
say "face to face with Love, or Pain, or Death," 



10 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

— phrases which you will admit are quite familiar 
and intelligible to us. 

And we may all, too, probably agree in admit- 
ting that there is that which we name " the Eter- 
nal, " — even if it were no more than bleak, blind, 
Eternal Fate, — something beyond our grasp, be- 
yond our conception, beyond our imagination, be- 
yond our faculty of reason, which yet does enter 
as an element into the experience of our life ; nay, 
is that substance, or groundwork, without which 
our thought of life itself would be impossible. 
And I say that when — by direct contact, as it 
were, or by a certain mental shock, and not by a 
mere process of understanding — it is distinctly 
recognized as a factor in our own life, then and' 
then only that which we call Religion may be 
properly said to begin with us, as a part of our 
life's experience. 

I wish to keep as clear as I possibly can of all 
professional or technical phraseology, which would 
only obscure the fact till we have the fact itself to 
read it by. I will begin, therefore, with the sim- 
plest possible appeal to your imagination of what 
you have seen a thousand times yourselves, — pos- 
sibly (as I had done) without the interpreting hint. 
I was travelling many years ago in a railway train 
through the lovely scenery of western Connecticut, 
with the second volume of Ruskin's "Modern 
Painters " (then just out), which I used as a run- 
ning comment on the phases of natural beauty we 
were passing by. It was as the glow of a clear 
sunset was beginning to fade that I came upon these 



HOW RELIGIONS GROW. 11 

words, which seemed to give the key to a feeling I 
had often had at this superb spectacle, without 

understanding it : — 

«- 

" There is yet a light which the eye invariably seeks 
with a deeper feeling of the beautiful, — the light of the 
declining or breaking day, and the flakes of scarlet cloud 
burning like watchfires in the green sky of the horizon. 
I am willing to let it rest on the determination of every 
reader whether the pleasure which he has received from 
these effects of calm and luminous distance be not the 
most singular and memorable of which he has been con- 
scious ; whether all that is dazzling in colour, perfect in 
form, gladdening in expression, be not of evanescent and 
shallow appealing, when compared with the still, small 
voice of the level twilight behind purple hills, or the scar- 
let arch of dawn over the dark, troublous-edged sea. . . . 
It is not by nobler form, it is not by positiveness of hue, 
it is not by intensity of light, that this strange distant 
space possesses its attractive power. But there is one 
thing that it has, or suggests, which no other object of 
sight suggests in equal degree, and that is — Infinity. 
. . . The sky of night, though we may know it boundless, 
is dark ; it is a studded vault, a roof that seems to shut us 
in and down ; but the bright distance has no limit ; we 
feel its infinity, as we rejoice in its purity of light." — 
(pp. 39, 40.) 

Now this direct appeal to the impression made 
on our own sense by the daily spectacle of dawn or 
twilight glow is better than to prove, by volumes 
of dissertation on dawn-myths and sun-myths, 
that precisely the same impression stirred the same 
sentiment of devotion in our Aryan ancestors thirty 



12 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

centuries ago. We have got hold of an original 
fact of our own experience, which gives, as I said, 
the simplest possible illustration of what we mean 
when we speak of coming "face to face with the 
Eternal." There are many and many ways of it 
which affect us far more profoundly, — which, if we 
think of it at all, stir in our minds a response to 
those words of Jacob : " Surely, the Eternal is in 
this place, and I knew it not!" 

Observe that the next words hint that the first 
feeling is deep awe: "And he was afraid, and 
said, How dreadful is this place ! " I may com- 
pare this feeling, akin to terror, with what suddenly 
comes to a boy learning to swim, who for the first 
time finds himself beyond his depth with nothing 
to buoy him up : his life is committed to a new, 
strange element, which he has not yet learned to 
trust. Coleridge tells us that the sense of terror 
is what one naturally feels at first when he finds 
himself in direct presence of the spiritual realm ; 
and he illustrates it by a case which he seems to 
have known himself. I give it from a very distant 
memory. A young man, he says, professed a com- 
plete and scornful disbelief of what is commonly 
called the world of spirits, and some companions 
of his planned to put his scepticism to the proof 
by the very simple trick, that one of them should 
personate a ghost ; but as he was known to be reso- 
lute, and a dead shot with a pistol which he kept 
loaded by his bed, they took the precaution of 
drawing the ball first. When the ghost appeared, 
he at once challenged it and gave warning ; then, 



HOW RELIGIONS GROW. 13 

counting three, fired at it point blank. The 
ghostly form stood unmoved; and in another in- 
stant the young man fell back dead. The shock 
of finding — or of suddenly seeming to find — that 
real which he firmly believed to be only the 
shadow of a dream, had, said Coleridge, its nat- 
ural effect. Many of our modern ghost-seers have 
had their reason quite unhinged when they too 
have been thus brought, as they supposed, into 
sight and touch of those things which are invisible. 
But there are gentle and normal ways, as well 
as those that are violent and abnormal, which 
deeply affect the mind by the presence and touch 
of what I have called "The Eternal." Here, for 
instance, is a story which I find very touching, cut 
from a New York paper. It is of a young girl 
who had led a life of shame and misery, with in- 
creasing horror and repugnance, drowning her re- 
morse from time to time in drink. "But one 
night, " says the narrator, " I was taking her home 
after she had been on a terrible spree, when all of 
a sudden, in a dark block, she sank right down on 
her knees on a flagstone in the pavement, and 
vowed to be a Christian, and to lead a good life ; 
and from that night she has [done it], and every 
year at the anniversary night she goes to that spot, 
and kneels on that flagstone and renews her vow. 
That poor girl," he goes on to say, "going on 
pilgrimage once a year to a flagstone on the east 
side, and there, in darkness and silence, renewing 
her vows to God on the spot where His grace smote 
her down as it did Paul on his way to Damascus, 



14 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

is just as real and literal as the dialogue of two 
witty people in a drawing-room ; and to many of us 
it seems to furnish a type of theme better worth a 
master's touch." I do not ask you to accept any 
theory whatever by which this experience is to be 
explained. Think as you will of sudden conver- 
sions, and interpositions of Divine Providence in 
human life. I only ask you to look at the fact ; 
and then you may put it in any phrases which 
you think describe it better than those that I have 
quoted. What you are to notice is that that is 
how religion grows in a certain class of minds, and 
under certain conditions. It was the case of an 
ignorant, poor, probably superstitious, and what 
most people would call a vicious girl, if not irre- 
deemably lost. But at that one instant — to use 
the best phrase I can think of — she stood " face to 
face with the Eternal ; " and from that instant she 
was saved. 

She was ignorant and superstitious, we say. 
But the same thing happened in another way to 
another woman, who, of all I have personally 
known, perhaps best represents to the world what 
in New England is most cultivated and enlight- 
ened. You read in the life of Margaret Fuller 
that, on the journey in Europe from which she 
never returned alive, she lost her way one misty 
evening, while coming down a mountain side in 
Wales. The party who were with her went to seek 
a guide, but they too were lost in the impenetra- 
ble mist ; and all night long she wandered alone, 
till in the morning she reached a place of safety. 



HOW RELIGIONS GROW. 15 

So runs the account as nearly as I remember it. 
But what is not so generally known, says a friend 
of her earlier years, is that on that night (to use 
his expression) she found religion. She left be- 
hind from that hour the stage of experience in 
which she might seem to have shown only a type 
of mere literary culture, which is but vanity and 
vexation of spirit, and became that other woman 
who has gone into history transfigured and heroic 
because her later life was all given to service of 
others in the cause which seemed to her the most 
worthy and noble. 

I might go on with other examples which show 
how that element in our life here called The Eter- 
nal cuts like a flash across the path of every-day 
experience, showing by that flash the real things 
of a higher life, which, if we embrace and cling to 
it, becomes our religion. For instance, a man is 
struck low by a sickness or an accident or a heavy 
grief, that makes him suddenly realize, as he never 
did before, how our human life is continually beset 
by " an Adversary still as Death, swift as Light, 
strong as Fate, " — an Adversary whom it is impos- 
sible to question or resist ; and it is in the sense 
of his utter helplessness at that emergency that he 
first comes to know what those great words "Ab- 
solute " and "Eternal " mean. 

The first emotion, as I said, is apt to be one of 
terror; but the permanent impression, as I think, 
is more commonly that of peace. Before that 
which in comparison with any strength of ours is 
Infinite and Almighty we do not rebel, but sub- 



16 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

mit ; and in the act of submission we find the calm- 
ness which is a test, and perhaps the final test, of 
that way of life properly called religion. Thus 
Death, which is absolutely certain and inevitable 
to all, is at first contemplated by most men with 
extreme terror ; but physicians tell us that, when 
it actually approaches, it is met by almost every- 
body with perfect quietness and content, and with- 
out any dread at all. When the great scholar and 
diplomatist Bunsen said on his death-bed to his 
noble English wife, " In thy face have I seen the 
Eternal," he testified to- another side of the same 
truth, — that a loving trust so constant as to hint 
neither measure nor change is a type of that which 
in its very nature is immeasurable and unchange- 
able, and brings with it a deep peace. 

I come back, then, to my phrase, which I hope 
has by this time been relieved of anything that 
might seem vague or commonplace, and say again 
that " religion enters as a fact into the experience 
of a man's life when he finds himself, in whatever 
way, face to face with the Eternal." It would 
be proper now to go on and show how from this 
germ — that is, this moment of experience — it 
puts forth, stage after stage, its two-fold life, lay- 
ing hold upon the earth below with the firm roots 
of love and duty, and flowering out in the upper 
atmosphere of our life in hope, joy, trust, aspira- 
tion, and peace. But in doing this I should be 
simply following out the lines of illustration and 
appeal which are familiar to us, or ought to be, 
in our own observation of life about us, or in the 



HOW RELIGIONS GROW. 17 

great body of religious thought accessible to every- 
body. I must pass all that by, in order that I may 
complete what I have to say by attending briefly 
to the two remaining departments of my subject. 

And here we must go back to our study of the 
life of plants. Each seed that germinates grows 
" after its kind, " as the Bible says, — that is, by a 
pattern or model which we call the type of that 
particular plant. Thus the germ of a lily will al- 
ways send down its roots in separate threads, and 
send up its leaves with parallel veins, and produce 
a flower modelled on a pattern of threes ; while the 
germ of a rose will always put forth branching 
roots, and leaves with branching veins, and flow- 
ers modelled on a pattern of fives. What we call 
the type of the plant appears also in every fibre of 
the wood, in the odour, colour, or taste of every 
drop of sap, in the build of the plant itself, and in 
the structure of the fruit; so that, if you cut an 
apple across in thin slices and hold them up to the 
light, you will see a pattern of the five petals just 
as they were in the blossom before the fruit was 
formed. 

Now when we try to understand how a Religion 
grows, we must get if we can not merely at the facts 
of its growth, but at its type, or law of growth. 
We find it, I think, something in this way : Each 
of the great religions of the world has been in its 
origin what we call a revealed religion ; that is, 
it has been founded, or declared, by a man of re- 
ligious genius, who has in the course of his life 
been brought face to face with the Eternal in such 

2 



18 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

a way as to impress him very powerfully, and to 
take complete possession of his life. In one way 
the case of the Buddha Sakya-muni is an example 
of this, — who, being a prince brought up in every 
luxury, was overwhelmed suddenly by the specta- 
cle of human misery in its most pitiful forms, 
and renouncing all personal indulgence, devoted 
himself to a religion of infinite pity and extreme 
self-denial till I is death, and is said to have cre- 
ated the type of religion for a third of the human 
race. 

But the case of Moses is more familiar to us, and 
gives us a better example of what we mean by an 
historical religion. He, having been a great cap- 
tain in the armies of Egypt, and an adopted prince, 
learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, struck 
one hot blow in defence of a slave from the cruelty 
of his taskmaster, and then fled to the desert; 
where, long brooding in presence of the Eternal, 
he wrought out the faith which makes to this day 
the religion of his people. Now this religion is of 
a very marked type indeed, perhaps the most so of 
all that have ever existed. In particular, as we 
find it in the Old Testament, it combines two con- 
trary qualities in a supreme degree : one being be- 
lief in a God just, compassionate, and holy, who 
is as a father that pitieth his children, and whom 
his child may confide in to the uttermost; the 
other being adoration of an awful Sovereign, whose 
will overrides all human compunction or desire, 
and who is served by his chosen people with 
a fierce, bigoted, and intolerant loyalty to him 



HOW RELIGIONS GROW. 19 

alone. This, I say, is the character, the two-fold 
type, of the Old Testament religion. 

But this religion, taking its stamp thus from the 
life and character of the man, has developed two 
great offshoots, each far greater and mightier than 
itself, as they have reached out into the life of the 
modern world, and each especially characterized 
by one of those two qualities so marked in the 
original stock: I mean Christianity and Mahom- 
etanism. When we study the character of Jesus 
we find something in it of the heroic, aggressive, 
and dominating temper which, under other but 
quite supposable conditions, might have made him 
a great political and military leader, — especially 
through his wonderfully attractive and controlling 
power upon the minds of other men, — and this is 
the quality which appears to have most struck the 
minds of his first followers ; but very much more 
of that compassionate and tender quality which 
made it so natural to speak of him as " a man of 
sorrows and acquainted with grief. " In Mahomet, 
on the other hand, we find sudden gleams, indeed, 
of a compassion almost as tender, and a piety al- 
most as confiding ; but, in the main, the temper of 
a fierce, relentless, sensual desert chief, control- 
ling other men by passion, terror, and arbitrary 
wLLV-or else seducing them by promise and permis- 
sion of every indulgence of the flesh with its gross- 
est passions and lusts. 

Through all the conflicts and events of history, 
through all revolutions of opinion, through exam- 
ples of heroism and devotion, through crimes and 



20 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

atrocities unspeakable, shared (we might say) al- 
most equally between the two, that radical differ- 
ence of type has remained to this day. Each 
religion has kept something of the stamp put on it 
by its founder. The heart of Christendom has al- 
ways repeated that strain of tenderness and mercy ; 
the heart of Islam has always been intolerant, 
fierce, and domineering. "We are equal to you 
in every other way," said a learned Oriental to an 
English visitor, "but you have pity, which we have 
not. " And where the two religions come in sharp- 
est conflict to-day, in the heart of Africa, we find 
that those two types continue still unaltered. 
With all its enormous influence over the native 
mind, and its swift conversion of whole negro tribes, 
and the lift it gives them to a little higher level of 
intelligence and self-respect, the Mahometan faith 
keeps up the most horrible of plundering raids, 
and continually sends great caravans with misera- 
ble gangs of slaves to the remorseless, all-devour- 
ing East ; while Christian explorers are everywhere 
the protectors of those wretched tribes, their only 
hope of deliverance from that frightful bondage, 
and there are never lacking Christian envoys ready 
(like David Livingstone) to lay down their lives in 
tropic swamps that so the soul of Paganism may 
be redeemed. 

I say, then, that the question hoiv a religion 
grows must be met by trying to understand what 
is the real type of each historic faith. Particular 
beliefs may help explain it ; but it is seen a good 
deal more plainly in the race-type, or the parti cu- 



HOW RELIGIONS GROW. 21 

lar moral quality, which, it is likely, is found 
most fully developed in its Kepresentative Man, 
the founder of that faith. 

And when we inquire, further, how religions 
grow, I think we are forced to answer that they do 
not tend to grow together, as some suppose, or to 
lose their identity in some characterless compro- 
mise of creeds which might superficially represent 
an " absolute " or a " universal " religion ; but that 
they grow like trees in the forest,, like shrubs and 
flowers in a field, each keeping true to its own 
type, and matched in a perpetual struggle for 
existence that the fittest may survive. 

I might illustrate this at great length from the 
conflict of faiths in history. I might show how 
some religions have been exterminated by the 
sword, like the dismal tribal faiths of Canaan; 
how there havebeen attempted conquests, heroi- 
cally beaten back, as when the Persian monotheists 
tried to extinguish the idolatry of the Greeks ; 
how Cross and Crescent fought two centuries to- 
gether on the soil of Palestine, with never a truce 
that bartered a jot of either warrior creed ; how 
Oriental faiths crept in, under the mask of that 
long battle, making the " heresies " which papal 
Rome tried to blot out in fire and blood ; how the 
vanquished religion has again and again cropped 
out — as in Brittany, Bohemia, Bulgaria — under 
its old likeness, which had been thought to be 
quite destroyed; how indestructibly all types of 
Paganism survive, under the thin veneer of conver- 
sion laid on by Christian missionaries, — as we are 



22 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

told it is among the negroes of our Gulf States ; 
how the modern Free-Religionist, who thinks him- 
self emancipated from Christianity, carries its 
birthmark in every feature of his widening phi- 
lanthropy and his enlarged intelligence. 

But the task would be too long for you or me. 
And T can only close by saying that, if we would 
know the law of life in anything, we have these 
three things to do: first, to see the fact for our- 
selves, and so come to know it as an element in 
our own experience ; second, to ascertain as nearly 
as we can the exact type of growth in that partic- 
ular form of life which comes nearest to ourselves ; 
and third, to accept the law, or the fact, as nat- 
uralists explain it to us, of that conflict of types 
which has wrought out the wonderful variety, 
wealth, and harmony of the living world we see. 



II. 

RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE. 

" I will not let thee go until thou bless me." * 

CO knocks Fate at the door! are the words 
which Beethoven is said to have spoken when 
he struck with his own hand the first two bars of 
nis great Fifth Symphony. It was my good for- 
tune to hear this composition the first time it was 
performed in Boston, about forty-five years ago; 
and again the last time, a few weeks back. In the 
interval I have many times heard that strain, de- 
livered timidly, melodiously, hesitatingly, bril- 
liantly, as the case might be ; and it was with a 
certain shock of recognition that I caught now the 
imperious and almost angry emphasis with which 
that superb array of instruments announced the 
phrase. This Conductor, I said to myself, is right. 
That is what Beethoven meant! 

The next day there befell a certain thing, which 
appeared to throw light upon that same phrase from 
another quarter, and to help show how the life- 
problem which is set in the soul's direct touch with 

* The earlier portion of this chapter was composed during 
recovery from illness, and committed to writing afterwards. I 
have preferred to retain the language and imagery just as 
these were suggested at the time. 



24 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

the Fate that stands at the door and knocks — 
that great unsounded mystery which we hide under 
the name Nature — must be met by every man 
not in the way of rationalizing speculation, but 
in the way of living experience. 

For Nature as a general problem, more espe- 
cially, Nature in those hostile or malign aspects 
in which it is so often compelled upon our thought, 
remains the same blank and insoluble mystery 
that it has been since the beginning. It does not 
appear that either our Science of Nature, which 
has grown to be so rich, so wonderful, so fruitful 
in practical results, or our speculative Philosophy 
of Nature, which attempts to take all this in and 
explain it by symmetric theory, has ever advanced 
any man a single inch towards that mental peace 
and composure which is the only true solution of 
our life-problem. The one simply expands into a 
gorgeous and complex Cosmography, which is in- 
deed one of our chief intellectual delights, but lies 
all outside the realm of personal experience in 
which, if anywhere, that peace is to be found; 
while the other is at best a plausible Theodicy, or 
formulated optimism, held with a more or less 
wavering hold in theory, but in practice of not the 
slightest spiritual service, unless well kept in 
hand by a mind that has already found its peace, 
or won it, in personal touch or wrestle with what 
we may call a transcendental fact of its own life's 
experience. And what I mean by this phrase, we 
shall see by and by. 

Moreover, while it is probable — nay, certain — 



RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE. 25 

that no one soul, from the beginning, ever found 
its peace, joy, strength, salvation (whatever name 
we give it), by way either of natural science or of 
speculative philosophy, it is at the same time true 
that hundreds of millions of souls have found it, 
and are actually finding it every day, in the ex- 
ceedingly plain and unpretending way of real life, 
— which by the postulates of either physical or 
speculative science ought to be a blank impossi- 
bility. It might, indeed, be more strictly accurate 
to speak of hundreds of millions of daily acts of 
reconciliation, than of so many truly reconciled 
lives ; since religion is at all events a vital pro- 
cess, not a statical condition. But, if one will 
take the trouble to think of it, he will see that 
these lives, in the sense we mean, are, by any reck- 
oning we will, prodigiously numerous. Nothing is, 
in fact, a more touching thing in real life than 
the serious acceptance, without question or pro- 
test, of the most adverse conditions of life among 
the suffering and lowly. No prejudice is at once 
more shallow and more cruel than that which re- 
gards Religion, in this humblest and noblest sense, 
as somehow a perquisite of "the elect;" all the 
worse, if these elect are held, in any special way, 
to mean the educated and the refined. The faith 
which it implies may be grasped only a point at 
a time, very likely only for a moment at a time ; 
for it is a process that must be as incessantly re- 
newed as leaves upon a growing tree. That is 
the way of faith , and there is salvation in none 
other. The method of it makes the most interest- 



26 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

ing and the most fundamental of all investigations 
of religious psychology. 

In order to see more clearly what is meant by 
a " transcendental fact " of personal experience, I 
will take up one not rare and recondite, but so 
common that most persons have encountered it 
more than once, and all of us have got, knowingly 
or not, to meet it, sooner or later, face to face. 
Our purpose, then, shall be not simply to know it 
when we see it, but to look at it so closely as to 
find out what is in it, seen through and through. 

A busy man (let us then suppose), in his ordi- 
nary health, so far as all known tests go, is con- 
tentedly nearing the end of his week's work, fairly 
satisfied with what he has done, and ready, but not 
nervously anxious, for the next task in hand. 
Suddenly, as he begins to lay by his tools, a cold 
touch, as of a finger of ice ; a chill, that the glow 
of fire will not mitigate ; a fast-increasing shiver, 
which yields to no enfolding comfort ; then a shud- 
der and a great trembling, which throws him upon 
his bed doubled up in distress, turned inside-out 
with physical self-loathing, each corporal agent 
seeming in his little state in hot rebellion against 
the Lords of life ; and in half an hour this busy 
and cheerful person, who stood alike ready for an 
invitation to dine or an afternoon walk, knows 
that he has got, with what heart he may, to face a 
week or a month of ignoble miseries, with possible 
relays of sharp pain, — with the chance that by 
the end of another week or month, by skill of tend- 
ing, humiliating personal cares, and favouring con- 



RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE. 27 

ditions, that same blind, pitiless Force may let 
him back to his task with lame hands and halting 
upon his thigh ; or, failing these, may just as un- 
concernedly deliver him to his burial. Meantime, 
he lies helpless, and waits the event. So knocks 
Fate at the door! 

This, as I have said, is no peculiar and rare ex- 
perience, but an exceedingly common one, of daily 
and even hourly occurrence. Still, coming as it 
did, it has touched him on a new spot, and has 
sharpened his apprehension to a new set of rela- 
tions in which he finds himself placed to the uni- 
versal laws of life. When we speak of it, among 
other facts of his experience, as a "transcen- 
dental " fact of his life, it is not that as a bit of 
human history it is less familiar than the others ; 
not that it is less easily traceable among the se- 
quences of cause and effect : but that, more defi- 
nitely than the rest, it puts the point of individual 
experience in touch with the more obscure and 
general laws of our being ; it appeals in a different 
way and (so to speak) under a higher authority to 
his own consciousness of what he does or is. It 
has brought him, for one moment of his life, face 
to face with the Eternal. 

Naturally, he is desirous to find out all he can 
about it, looking at it from outside, or with other 
people's eyes. Thus, for example, his scientific 
adviser will probably qualify the experience by 
some euphonious Greek term — pneumonia, or what- 
ever it may be — which stands to the initiated for 
a certain group and sequence of morbid symptoms, 



28 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

and so is convenient for the classifying, denning, 
or practical handling of them, without hinting a 
word of their meaning or value as an element in 
his conscious life. The smooth-tongued idealist, 
who affects by fine-woven theory to fit it in with 
some optimistic scheme of things only half real or 
believable to himself, is in yet worse plight than 
the other, when he has to face a state of mind to 
which a fever is after all just a fever, a simoom a 
simoom, and a blizzard a blizzard, — all of them 
deadly and irreconcilable enemies to that plausible 
theory of life which to such a state of mind has as 
yet no sense or reality. The moral process must 
go before, to make the mental one intelligible : 
first be reconciled, then come and offer the gift. 
For all the help that is offered him so far, the 
seeker must go forth alone upon his solitary quest. 
He has come, in his soul's pilgrimage, to his 
ford Jabbok, and there he must wrest if he can 
a blessing from the very Phantom with which he 
has wrestled until the breaking of the day. 

When he has come to that point, he finds that the 
first shock of the experience is something like this : 
he has become suddenly aware (perhaps really for 
the first time in his life) that over against this or- 
derly system of things — in which he has his daily 
being, in which his accepted theories have taught 
him that science or skill have made men masters of 
their destiny — there stands an Adversary, still as 
Death, swift as Light, strong as Fate : he has, as it 
were, caught a moment's sight of this Adversary, 
vanishing formless like a dream, and seen the 



RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE. 29 

glint of the sword that had so nearly touched his 
own life while it as suddenly withdrew into the 
enveloping darkness. Henceforth he knows that 
it is the one problem of the higher life with him 
how to contend victoriously in the spirit against 
the Adversary that is sure, sooner or later, to foil 
and overthrow all strength that rests on flesh or 
mind or will. To win that one victory must be 
his main life-purpose now; and the winning of it 
is the attainment of what we call by those great 
words Atonement, Reconciliation, and Salvation. 

For not only there are griefs and pains and final 
overthrow in every human life, incessantly calling 
for a renewal of this reconciling process, but the 
experience is as old and as wide as the life of hu- 
manity itself. All men from the beginning have 
had this Vision, out of the great darkness men- 
acing their ignorance, their helplessness, and their 
fear. Always there has been hinted to the be- 
wildered thought some terrifying form of Dual- 
ism, in which the Adversary is personified as a 
Power hostile to that realm of order and light in 
which our life is cast: as the jealous Ahriman of 
the Persians, adopted as Satan into the mythology 
of Jew and Christian ; as the gloomy Tsarnebog, 
"black god" of the heathen Bulgars, that went 
into the dark terror of mediaeval heresy; as the 
mighty Mumbo-Jumbo, that gives shape to the 
most abject forms of savage superstition now. 
The experience is human and universal; the name 
it takes is merely the symbol of the one great 
Dread. 



30 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

Thinking on it a little further, he will not be 
content to stay in these abject levels of gross ter- 
ror. He will remember, first, that "the Shadow 
feared of man" is, after all, a part of the same 
system of Nature amidst which long generations 
of men have found possible not only life, but with 
it reconciliation and peace, prosperity, content- 
ment, and joy. And then he will call to mind 
what in its literal sense is the meaning of the 
name Nature, — the great encompassing, enshroud- 
ing mystery ; the Divine Mother, whose face indeed 
is always veiled, as in that statue at Sais which 
bore the legend " No mortal hath my veil uplifted, " 
yet whose motherly heart all men have seemed to 
feel somehow beating against their own. The 
name by which we know the great mystery is 
Natura, She that shall bring to the birth. And in 
that phrase he finds not blind mystery only, but a 
certain suggestion of comfort and hope. 

Nay, under the spell of this gracious interpreta- 
tion, he is led still farther on, so as to give voice 
even to the very experience of life that had first 
raised his abject terror, in some such way as 
this, speaking the kindly heart of the Universal 
Mother : — 

" My .poor Child, thou hast sinned. Passion and desire 
were too strong; the flesh was weak, and that has felt 
the necessary scourge. But the stroke is for discipline, 
not for vengeance ; only be thou wise and heed its 
meaning. Go in peace, having suffered the pain and 
smart ; and sin no more, lest a worse thing happen unto 
thee." 



RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE. 31 

Or else the Voice will say: — 

" My dear Child, how small was the measure of strength 
bestowed on thee, and how narrow thy opportunity, and 
how light the task that I required of thee ! And yet thou 
must needs attempt some great thing, and overspend 
thy strength, and risk the great end of life, to win a 
proud name, or heap up large treasure, or put forth a 
power not thine own upon the lives of other men. Thou 
didst not know how easy my yoke is, or my burden how 
light. But behold ! thy strength is taken wholly from 
thee, and thou art become as a little babe. Yet it shall 
be given back to thee for a season, this once ; and then 
do thou remember to work wisely while the day lasteth, 
knowing that the night cometh, when no man can work." 

And again the mild Voice speaks, tenderly and 
gravely : — 

" Come back, my Child, to the Everlasting Arms ! 
Thou art weary and spent. Thy little day is past. 
What thou hast done in it wisely and well shall go into 
the great treasure of the world's life for which thou hast 
laboured : that is thy reward. What thou hast wrought 
in it of waste and wrong is for evermore a shame and 
loss : that is thy judgment. But now thou must pass 
through the. deep water, — no longer the shallow ford, — 
and leave all that life behind, that thou mayest enter upon 
the eternal life, where is peace which passeth understand- 
ing, and where the weary be at rest." 

Now it will be observed that the process which 
has brought about this soothing and comforting 
interpretation of the dread mystery, is what has 
actually come to pass in the generations of the 
world's religious life. In particular, with all its 



32 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

fulness of meaning, it is the ripe fruit of what we 
call spiritual Christianity. It has been effected 
by no intellectual or logical play whatever: it has 
been wrought out by the patient effort to meet and 
vanquish, one by one, the pains and fears that 
beset the actual courses of men's daily and com- 
mon life. It expresses itself, frankly, in the lan- 
guage, not of critical opinion, but of emotion and 
of symbol. Attempt to formulate it in doctrine, 
ever so simple, and it is instantly caught up by 
the busy understanding and rent to shreds, which 
then became either castaway rags, or else the 
badges of division and debate — never a living 
vesture for the soul. The life and efficiency of the 
process depend on its remaining fundamentally 
religious, not critical, not philosophical. It be- 
gins with the conscious beating of the human heart 
against the Universal Heart. 

It springs from what we may call the appeal in 
our common nature to the motherly element in the 
life of Nature. So far as our timid theology has 
dared to recognize it, it has been found in the 
blind, passionate demand for the co-equal divinity 
of the Holy Spirit, which in the Christian formu- 
lary represents that interpenetrating universal Life. 
The hard Hebraic piety caught for once a flavour 
of its tenderness from afar, when it said that k, as 
a father pitieth his children, so the Eternal pitieth 
them that fear him. " But the rationalizing intel- 
lect and the masculine domination tend continually 
to prevail against the brooding emotion and the 
submissive will. Conscience, too. asserts the in- 



RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE. 33 

dependent vigour of the ethical sense, with its rec- 
ognition of a sovereign supreme Authority. What 
is purely passive and feminine, in the early ger- 
minating of the religious life, is taken up more and 
more into the wider circles of thought and experi- 
ence. And, with this larger mental grasp and 
more vigorous ethical sense, we find the soul at 
length fully emancipated from the ancient terror ; 
and in place of the austere and sombre Fate to 
whose stroke he listened at the beginning, the 
grown man hears the voice of a Father, saying to 
him, Behold, I stand at the door and knock! 

In short, the conquest of Nature, or the solution 
of its darker problems, taken in this sense, is in 
no way a scientific or a speculative process, but 
purely a religious one. It may, to be sure, be 
helped or hindered by the gain in accurate knowl- 
edge, or by the general conceptions men hold re- 
specting the Universal Life. But, by the actual 
evidence we find in religious history, it is ex- 
traordinarily little dependent on anything of the 
kind. Ignorance the most gross and blinding, 
doctrine so appalling that if really believed it 
would needs drive the dullest into a frenzy of un- 
controllable terror, does not in point of fact seem 
in the least to shut out the unquestioning believer 
from the serenest religious peace. A hint of ques- 
tion, of doubt, will it is true wake to a great pas- 
sion the horror of that ghastly fear: "and fear 
hath torment ; " wherefore it is needful that it be 
banished by any method of rational conviction that 
can be had. gftill, first and last, the fundamental 



34 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

thing to be had in mind is this : that while, scien- 
tifically, the problem of Nature, or the universal 
life, is not even thinkable, and while speculatively 
it is and must ever remain absolutely unsolva- 
ble, yet practically it both can be and continually 
is perfectly solved in the experience of the reli- 
gious life. 



The effect of the last half-century's debate has 
been to make us look at Religion too much from 
the outside ; to find it in men's theory, opinion, 
doctrine, speculation about religion, — nay, of late, 
even in their system of natural science, as in the 
much-preached doctrine of evolution, which has 
come with some of us to have a sort of sacredness, 
as of a creed. Or, by a singularly one-sided defi- 
nition, it has been held to consist in the mere 
emotion stirred in us when we stand consciously 
in presence of the Infinite Force which embraces 
and controls our lives, — an emotion that easily 
evaporates into sentiment, vapid and thin, a feeble 
parody of the mighty force which religion is in the 
soul, — as when Herbert Spencer exalts the mood 
in which we contemplate the vastness of geologic 
periods, in disparagement of the humbler and 
homelier notion which he rails at in the "religion 
of humanity." Or, again, Religion has been in 
these latter years confounded by many with Ethics, 
which is really its complement or counterpart. 
Each may expand so as seemingly to cover the 
whole ground included in the other; but in truth 



RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE. 35 

they are as spirit and body, or as the right hand 
and the left. Religion, as we have practically to 
deal with it, as a power in men's lives, is at bot- 
tom the effort of the soul to find inward peace in a 
world of sin, sorrow, pain, and death, where to so 
many life is an unexplained and unrelenting trag- 
edy ; while Ethics is in substance the effort of the 
soul directed outward, to subdue existing wrong, 
want, or suffering, or to attain some nobler pattern 
of individual or social life. The sorrow, pain, 
and wrong are essential conditions of mortality in 
human life as we find it. Without a vivid sense 
of them, and a hand-to-hand conflict against them, 
Religion would not exist as a power in men's 
lives : it would be at best a dream, a theory, an 
emotion, a vision of the fancy, a figment of the 
brain ; not what it really is and ever has been, — 
deliverance, salvation, strength. 

That is what, in fact, religion really means to 
us. The solution, it may be, must be sought 
through the extremest anguish and wrestling of 
soul that one is capable of; but, unless we see 
that it may be had, and accept the method of at- 
taining it, we have no gospel to work with, and 
religion is at best a vague outside thing to us. 
The very exhaustion which has come upon men's 
speculative faculty — that which we call " agnosti- 
cism " — seems of itself to force us back upon the 
conception of religion as a thing of life, in order 
to interpret the commonest facts of experience or 
the plainest evidence of history. Some men, wise 
in their own conceits, overlook that way altogether ; 



36 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

but by the understanding heart of genius it is 
easily discerned. Among what we may perhaps 
regard as Count Tolstoi's wild exaggerations on 
this subject, there is one view of it he puts which 
is profoundly touching and profoundly true. Among 
the prosperous and cultivated he had found every 
form and degree of scepticism; a proud, prosper- 
ous, and cultivated man himself, he had fallen 
into a condition of blank intellectual despair, 
which lasted till he found genuine faith again 
among the ignorant, the suffering, and the poor. 

I listened the other evening to a highly in- 
structed young Japanese, who set forth with much 
ardour his sense of Christianity and Buddhism, as 
the two great world-religions glorified by the per- 
sonal character of their founders ; and I could not 
avoid a certain feeling of resentment that a seri- 
ous parallel should be drawn between the two. 
We may set wholly aside, if we will, the statement 
respecting Sakya-muni by the Hindoo critic, — that 
his conversion was the late recoil of a more earn- 
est nature from the voluptuous life of an Eastern 
Prince, so far remote from the clean, wholesome 
village tradition of the Child in Nazareth. But, 
take it at the very highest estimate ever made, 
there is in that Oriental type this prime defect : we 
find nothing at all in it of a vigorous, joyous, con- 
structive virtue, — not a touch of the fine quality 
we call manliness. It is, in short, the virtue of a 
Saint Francis of Assisi without his sunny cheer; 
the morbid asceticism of Saint Ignatius Loyola 
without his flaming courage ; the tenderness of 



RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE. 37 

Saint Charles Borromeo without the resolute tem- 
per in him, that ran into severity and sternness of 
administration, while it gave him the strength of 
hand to help. And these, too, are mediaeval or 
Catholic types, without half the rounded manhood, 
the intellectual courage, the statesmanly vigour, of 
our modern ones. Take, on the other hand, such 
estimate as we can get of the character of Jesus 
on its purely human side ; and we find, among 
other traits, a passionate sympathy with his peo- 
ple's sense of wrong and their fervid patriotic 
hope, which in manly quality is degrees above an 
equally passionate sympathy with mere hopeless 
wretchedness. In the one there is at least a hint 
of what might possibly be developed (as it was) 
into the conception of a world-Saviour; in the 
other, with the tenderest of sympathy, there is at 
best but a purely passive surrender to misery as 
an overwhelming Fate. 

The critical temper of the last half-century had 
something in it to blind us to that unique and in- 
estimable ideal which we call "the character of 
Christ. " This is not quite the same as what we 
mean when we speak of the character of " the man 
Jesus ; " for of that we know too little for a com- 
parative judgment of any value. It is hest, here, 
to keep outside the disputed province of historical 
criticism: leave that with the critics, where it 
belongs. But when they have said their last 
word, or the last that we care to hear, we may re- 
turn with all our hearts to that ideal of a Divine 
Humanity, as the very richest moral legacy left us 



38 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

by the faith and reverence of the past. That ideal, 
we may well grant, is not so much the character 
of an individual, as it is the creation of long 
"ages of faith." The very steps in its develop- 
ment are not difficult to trace, however inconsist- 
ently or reluctantly we may have consented to 
accept the notion that there has been such a 
development at all. 

Reluctantly, I say. For the first steps of that 
idealizing process are very strange to us, and in 
violent conflict with our modern feeling. Far 
from taking what is tender and compassionate in 
the heart of Jesus, which we always think of first, 
these early witnesses even exaggerate the quali- 
ties that belong to imperious self-assertion, such as 
men looked for in the expected triumphant Sover- 
eign; nay, they distort these qualities into the 
fierce, vindictive temper so marked in the popular 
Messianic hope. And so we hear of Christ's 
second coming " in flaming fire taking vengeance " 
on his adversaries (2 Thess. i. 8), and of shrink- 
ing from " the wrath of the Lamb " (Rev. vi. 16), 
when the victim turns and retaliates upon those 
who have slain him ; while with Saint Paul " the 
judgment-seat of Christ," far from thoughts of 
mercy and pardon, suggests a certain "terror of 
the Lord" (2 Cor. v. 11), of power to "persuade 
men. " 

These testimonies show that not the tenderness 
and humility of the Beatitudes, not the passion- 
less exaltations of the Fourth Gospel, not the mys- 
tic transfigurations in the later Pauline thought, 



RELIGION AS EXPERIENCE. 39 

were the features earliest ascribed to the glorified 
Redeemer; but, instead of these, an exaggeration 
of the austerity and terror hinted at in the stern 
denunciations or apocalyptic visions of Matthew 
and Luke. This is to say, again, that the traits 
first adopted as a groundwork in that extraordi- 
narily complex ideal which later times have wor- 
shipped as their incarnate Deity, were the strong 
and masculine traits, including especially an im- 
perious sovereignty and a deep capacity of wrath, 
— the farthest possible from the pallid, morbid, 
almost feminine image found in the mediaeval 
Christ and the Oriental Buddha. It is, humanly 
speaking, a far nobler and wholesomer conception, 
alien as it is from the tone of our modern senti- 
ment ; and in a time of deepening moral conflict, 
like that which is upon us now, we shall turn back 
to it with a profounder sense of the value of its 
stringent, chastening quality, in a world that con- 
tinually needs, not the tones of comfort and condo- 
lence only, but the sterner voice of a " Captain " of 
its salvation. 



in. 

WHAT IS A REVELATION? 

"The heavens were opened and I saw visions." 

I" ITERALLY, we say, a revelation is "draw- 
ing back the veil." It is the rising of the 
curtain at a theatre, which shows a scene that 
was there before, but out of our sight. Anything 
is a "revelation," which suddenly discloses to us 
the motive or the circumstances of an action 
that before was perplexing and unintelligible. In 
the very highest sense, it is a revelation to us 
when, in like manner, the riddle of the life we 
lead, and the deep mystery of the universe, is 
solved, or seems to be solved, by a vision that 
comes — no matter how — showing us its real 
meaning and purport, solving its perplexity, and 
giving us intellectual repose. Thus to many per- 
sons of the present generation the theory of evolu- 
tion, coming to them as a fresh solvent of their 
mental difficulties, has been a revelation in a sense 
as strict as our argument requires. 

All this turns, to be sure, on our taking for 
granted the objective verity of that which is thus 
disclosed. The thing that was hidden was there 
before : now that the curtain is drawn, we see it 
as it was. This makes what we call the " realism " 



WHAT IS A REVELATION ? 41 

of poets and philosophers, when they discourse on 
what we call spiritual truth. In a sense perfectly 
intelligible, all the higher, nobler, larger concep- 
tions which men's minds are capable of have come 
to them as a discovery of something seen (as it 
were) with "the mind's eye." Religion, say phil- 
osophers, is of two sorts or sources, — natural and 
revealed. Natural religion consists in the reflex 
action we are conscious of upon the phenomena of 
the outward universe, especially those which touch 
the imagination, or waken strong emotions of 
awe, terror, wrath, love, delight: such is the re- 
ligion of the Vedic Hymns, of the Greek mythol- 
ogy, of most popular superstitions. Revealed 
religion is that which comes in the long brooding 
and reflection of superior minds upon the deeper 
law and the hidden meaning of human life, whose 
fundamental significance is ethical: such is the 
religion of Moses, of Buddha, of Zoroaster, of 
Islam, of iEschylus, of Christ. 

In popular use, however, this sense of the word 
is narrowed to something more specific and defin- 
ite. It becomes imperious, intolerant, exclusive : 
making one particular revelation true, it declares 
all the others to be false. Thus every so-called re- 
vealed religion has had its propaganda, its mission- 
aries and martyrs, its conquests, its persecutions, 
contrasting with the generous pantheon of what 
was purely natural or ethnic. Xerxes was a " de- 
fender of the faith," as much as Mahomet or 
Charlemagne, and attacked Greece as a nation of 
idolaters, just as the Crusaders did the Saracens. 



42 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

The Christian creed is not the only one to be 
condemned as intolerant, though many persons 
seem to think so; indeed, the more the particu- 
lar faith is prized and vigorous, the more sharply 
it sets itself against all rivals. The claim of 
the Christian revelation, accordingly, interests 
us not as a dogma, but as a type ; no longer as a 
point to be defended or attacked in theological 
debate, but as a fact of human nature to be stud- 
ied and explained. It has been taken, almost 
under our own eyes, out of the realm of speculative 
doctrine, and brought upon the quite tangible 
ground of historic criticism or philosophic inquiry. 
And it is upon this latter ground that I propose 
to consider one or two points of interest which it 
may offer. 

The first thing we have to notice, as to the claim 
just quoted, is that the canon-worship it pre- 
scribes is not confined to Jews and Christians. It 
is only one example of a fact which we find wher- 
ever — east of the Mediterranean, at any rate — 
sacred writings have been preserved and cherished 
(as they seem always to have been) in an obsolete 
if not forgotten tongue. " The orthodox Hindoo, " 
we are told, "regards the Vedas with the most 
intense reverence, as the inspired word of God 
existing from eternity, and as the foundation of 
everything in religion, philosophy, art, science, 
and literature." The Vendidad "is cast chiefly 
in the form of colloquies between the Supreme 
Divinity and his servant or prophet Zarathustra 
(Zoroaster), in which the former makes known to 



WHAT IS A REVELATION ? 43 

the latter his will respecting his creation. " " The 
Koran is, according to the Moslem creed, coeval 
with God, uncreated, eternal. Its first transcript 
was written from the beginning in rays of light 
upon a gigantic tablet resting by the throne of the 
Almighty ; and upon this tablet are also found the 
divine decrees relating to things past and future. " 
In the Jewish Sanhedrim, "it was a question 
whether the Law itself or the tradition were the 
holier: 'The words of the Law are weighty and 
light, but the words of the Scribes are all weighty, ' 
was a saying among the Jews, — one which must 
have been vehemently contested, until the dispute 
was compromised by affirming that both, if not 
absolutely eternal, at least existed in Paradise 
before the world was. " There is no space here to 
trace the subtile association of ideas, or the men- 
tal habits of the race, or all the steps of develop- 
ment, that led to such a belief. It is enough to 
show that, in dealing with it, we are dealing with 
a fact not particular and exceptional, but wide- 
spread and general. We are met, if not by an 
experience as broad as human nature itself, at 
least by a characteristic which prevails in all the 
Oriental races whose religious writings we know. 
We may call it superstition, dogma, or tradition: 
what we find is a certain condition of their reli- 
gious thought. The writings themselves to which 
the religion clings are in each instance writings 
whose contents, character, and date are ascer- 
tained, as nearly as may be, by the ordinary criti- 
cal or historical proofs. 



44 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

The thing we notice is, next, that during the 
creative period of Hebrew literature there are no 
symptoms whatever of the set, artificial, and 
"sacred" character which later times ascribed to 
the same writings. All that is an after-thought. 
It belongs to a period when the differences, so ob- 
vious now to an educated eye, were merged in a 
fond, uncritical reverence, a grateful memory, that 
knew no longer any controversy of prophet and 
priest, of Jahveh and Elohim; that saw the life of 
Israel single and unique, relieved against the dim 
background of a prehistoric past. There is a 
Jewish legend which, in a very characteristic way, 
introduces us to this later phase of the Hebrew 
mind. It tells that, in the conquest by Nebuchad- 
nezzar and in the captivity of Babylon, all the sa- 
cred things were plundered or destroyed, and every 
record was burned : the sacred history, song, proph- 
ecy, all that inestimable treasure of venerable writ- 
ings, had perished utterly ; but Ezra the Scribe, in 
the return to Jerusalem, was specially inspired to 
remember every word just as it had been written in 
the sacred books, so that he dictated to an amanu- 
ensis a copy in all points identical with that which 
had been destroyed. Translated into modern 
phrase, this task of Ezra was the task of editor- 
ship. Like those modern scholars who are de- 
ciphering the literary remains of Nineveh and 
Babylon to-day, he was the compiler, arranger, 
redacteur, of the relics that had floated safe from 
the general wreck. Fragments they were, no 
doubt, from a vastly greater bulk, — fragments 



WHAT IS A REVELATION ? 45 

which no skill of editing could so piece together 
that the loose joints and the diversity of material 
should be disguised. * Nor does any sign appear 
that this was even attempted. It is rather as if, 
with a pious and reverent care, everything had 
been bundled together that could be gathered up, 
without even wiping off the unclean sea-slime and 
the noisome weeds. Nothing, in such a gather- 
ing, is common or unclean. Each portion keeps 
the mark, colour, flavour, that belonged to it in its 
original form. Often, as in despair of any har- 
monious adjustment, the fragments are simply 
cast in, side by side, without pretence of date or 
sequence or consistency with one another, to piece 
out the rude structure, and so to make the editor's 
task complete. 

It is, perhaps, the symptom of a certain mental 
lassitude and despair which come upon a people in 
its decline, that sacred writings, thus fondly ide- 
alized and made the type of every perfection, come 
presently to be ascribed to a superhuman source. 
The native genius in its decrepitude cannot even 
conceive the imagination of a mind to create or a 
voice to give utterance to them. It finds in itself 
no likeness or suggestion of such a power: it is 
dazed, like the dwellers near Baalbec, who gaze 
with fear and amazement at the mighty ruin, and 
think that those vast stones were piled there by 
genii, and not by men. With a people in that 
mental condition, the achievement of the past, even 
the work of its own ancestors, serves no longer to 
stimulate and instruct, but to oppress and overawe. 



46 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

We have seen, and still see, enough of this intel- 
lectual timidity, even in a population so daring 
and irreverent as our own, not to be surprised at 
the shape it took in the more slavish and imagina- 
tive East, and among a people whose only monu- 
ment of the past was the group of sacred writings 
gathered about the shrine of their ancestral faith. 
To that sentiment we may ascribe no small share 
in forming those previous conditions under which 
the doctrine became not only possible but natural, 
— nay, inevitable. Canon- worship marks the tran- 
sition from a creative period in the national gen- 
ius to its faintness and eclipse. 

It would seem too as if the formal definition of a 
revelation which limits it to some particular group 
of sacred writings, when we trace it far enough 
down from its source to its final issue, brought us 
back to our starting-place in the moral experience. 
Minds of a certain order have been deeply, and 
often suddenly, convinced of truth which seems 
not the mere generalization of fact, but belonging 
to quite another sphere. We call this truth spir- 
itual or transcendental, meaning by that term that 
it is no such mere generalization of fact. Our 
apprehension of it we call a revelation, meaning 
that it was covered (as it were) by a veil from our 
sight until the veil was put back and it became as 
clear to our vision as stars in the sky when the 
curtain of clouds drifts off. The thing revealed 
may include this or that; but it presents itself 
to our thought as a moral or divine Order which 
rules and shapes the system of things we live in, 



WHAT IS A REVELATION ? 47 

so that we can find peace only in somehow adjust- 
ing our life in harmony with it. It makes the 
sphere of our practical religion ; and only in this 
sense is it true that religion, as has been said, 
implies "a theory of the universe." The thing 
seen is that the moral or divine Order, thus re- 
vealed, is of supreme authority both in the sphere 
of thought and the sphere of action: it is the su- 
preme Truth and the perfect Right. Whatever 
else men have agreed or differed in, all to whom 
such insight has ever come are agreed in this. 

In the sphere of experience, then, a revelation, 
however it comes, is always held to be valid and 
absolute as to the thing revealed. But it is the 
deepest problem of all philosophy what this thing 
really is. Is it only (so to speak) a state of mind, 
in which, conditioned as he is, man finds his tru- 
est peace ? This, I suppose, would be the Bud- 
dhistic interpretation of it, as distinct from the 
Christian. For the Christian view has always 
been that the Divine Order is a sphere objectively 
real, — just as we may suppose depths of the sky 
successively revealed to us by the telescope, — and 
that the eternal life it includes is one which we 
may share in, consciously, surviving all the acci- 
dents of time. Now this, from the nature of the 
case, is not contained in the experience ; it can at 
best be only suggested by the experience. And it is 
not obvious, at first sight, how it can have the valid- 
ity of " revealed " and objective truth. To say that 
it is truth of a spiritual order, made known to us 
by the conscience and heart, and not by the criti- 



48 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

cal understanding, is perfectly true and sound as 
long as we confine ourselves within the bounds of 
men's religious history and experience. But it is 
a mere play of words when we say that it proves 
the real existence of anything outside those bounds, 
— unless we are agreed upon some method, or 
canon, by which the subjective experience can be 
translated into objective fact. And for this the 
process is no way scientific : at best it hints what 
may be, it does not prove what it is. We may ap- 
proach the question, tentatively, in some such way 
as this: — 

First, the universe, by the best understanding 
we can gain of it, is made up of facts which show 
present, active, and (as it were) conscious thought 
controlling the phenomena : in the formula which 
Dr. Hedge has made familiar, Intelligence co- 
ordinate with Being. Mind and matter are the 
warp and woof of things. The mathematical ac- 
curacy in selection and the mechanical nicety in 
adjustment which make what we call the "law"" 
of crystalline structure are an intellectual, not a 
merely material, phenomenon : we find a series of 
facts prearranged and controlled by the forming 
Mind. Where are the invisible fingers feeling in 
the darkness ? where is the grouping instinct 
among the " atoms, " that will not be content with 
anything less than absolute obedience to that law ? 
where is the far finer than any chemist's balance, 
that determines the exact proportion and weight 
among them ? Or, where method and purpose ap- 
pear still plainer, as in the growth, the symmetri- 



WHAT IS A REVELATION ? 49 

cal flowering, and the nicely-timed fructification 
of a plant, it is the same thing on another plane. 
Who will affect to say either that there is no con- 
trolling and (as it were) consciously contrived and 
intended plan, or that that plan resides in the 
mere blind elective affinities with which the chemi- 
cal atoms are supposed to be endowed ? Will any 
atheistic fatuity or positivistic reticence deny the 
simple fact, that the instincts of animals, to say 
nothing of the adaptations of their structure, show 
directing intelligence somewhere, which it would 
be wildly absurd to ascribe to the rudimentary 
mental structure of the animal tribes themselves, 
— the beaver, the ant, the migrating swallow, — or 
to the laws of their organization as such ? We say 
nothing here of the attributes of an assumed Crea- 
tor : that is a matter quite beyond our province to 
determine. At this point we must keep clear of 
all the tangle of prejudice and misrepresentation 
that has gathered about the argument from design. 
At present it is enough to say that, when we speak 
of controlling thought or purpose in these things, 
we commit ourselves to no doubtful theory what- 
ever, but are using the simplest and plainest lan- 
guage we can find to tell the most familiar fact. 

Again : these hints of controlling intelligence in 
single things are found to be in harmony with 
some larger plan which we are but slowly coming 
to comprehend : they constantly involve harmonies 
remote, occult, unsuspected, which are sure to be 
made more and more clear with the advance of 
scientific discovery. The operations of the con- 



50 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

trolling Mind are nowhere shown to be mistaken 
or deceptive ; only a few of the obscurest facts of 
physiology so much as perplex us as to their true 
intent. The adaptation is just as perfect where 
it involves spheres of being apparently • quite dis- 
tinct — as the animal instincts in migration or in 
the choice of food — as in the simpler cases of veg- 
etable growth corresponding to soil and climate, 
or the narrow play of affinities in the structure of 
a gem. The intelligence which forms, guides, 
and controls, does in fact (whatever else we may 
think of the nature of it) compel each grade of 
existence to conform itself, as if by clear purpose 
and forethought, to conditions of being wholly out- 
side its oivn range; while in every instance the 
course of action so compelled upon it is found to 
correspond, in entire harmony, with laws and 
facts made known only by patient search in other 
fields. I am not repeating here the exploded ar- 
guments of an old-school teleology. Take that 
curious summing-up by Hartmann of the facts of 
this order, and for his phrase " The Unconscious " 
substitute some theistic equivalent, and you have, 
without other change of a single word, a chapter 
out of some modern Paley. He escapes the charge 
of theism only by his adroit use of the neuter gen- 
der. This second step in our argument — what we 
may call the veracity of nature — has nothing to do 
with any doubtful theory to account for the fact, 
but is simply our plainest statement of the fact 
itself. 

We are apt to think that the conscious intellect 



WHAT IS A REVELATION? 51 

covers the whole ground of our thought. The 
popular notion draws a sharp distinction in kind 
between those forms of animal intelligence we 
have just noticed and our own, holding that man 
is devoid of instinct (or unconscious reason), 
while the brute has neither rational faculty nor 
conscious thought. Another view degrades the 
instinct in man to those lowest forms of intelli- 
gence or passion likest the brutes, recognizing no 
super-conscious as well as sub-conscious action of 
the mind. But all religious philosophy has de- 
clared, in one or another form, the agency in our 
higher thinking of a universal Mind — a Spirit, 
"Over-soul," Logos, or Divine Reason — whose 
sphere is outside the limits of our thought, and is 
quite as plainly to be found in human life as in 
inferior forms of existence. Where do we find, 
in human history or experience, the evidences of 
such a controlling Mind ? 

For one thing, we may reply, in those " laws " 
of history, especially the law of evolution in hu- 
man thought, now coming to be acknowledged by 
all classes of thinkers. The life of nations, the 
destiny of races, the genesis of historic periods, 
the development of intellectual systems, follow 
some law, or plan, capable of being stated in intel- 
ligible terms, which existed ideally before the be- 
ginnings of human history; which was just as 
active before mankind began to think consecutively 
as it is to-day ; which is so far beyond the scope or 
fathom of man's thought or will, that we cannot 
even conceive of it as a possible attribute of the 



52 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

human mind, any more than the laws of planetary 
motion. To trace that law, or intelligible plan, 
was regarded by Comte as the proper business of 
a " positive " philosophy. 

Again, there is the case of exceptional minds, 
— what we call genius in any of its forms. The 
most striking to the imagination are, perhaps, the 
instances of mathematical or of inventive genius. 
These imply the clear intuition of an order of 
facts and relations so remote and complex that 
often they cannot be intelligibly stated to persons 
not gifted with a corresponding faculty, while they 
can be shown to be regulating facts and relations, 
of the utmost value in practice: thus a table of 
logarithms is a blank mystery to the common 
sailor, who steers in obedience to it every day. 
Whence comes that faculty of intuition ? The 
mind conscious of it is apt to speak of it, rever- 
ently, as "a gift." What is the Mind that gives 
it ? Or shall we take the materialistic assump- 
tion, and say that it is simply the result of an or- 
ganization very finely endowed in this particular 
way ? And what does this assertion mean, once 
challenged and analyzed, but that the universe is 
(so to speak) charged with Absolute Intelligence, 
which manifests itself wherever there is a way 
for it, — like an electric battery, whose current 
can be drawn upon by any channel fitted to con- 
duct it, — an Intelligence of which instinct, reason, 
genius, creative skill, are but the successive mani- 
festations in heightening degrees of intensity ? 

If it were so, the first obvious condition or limi- 



WHAT IS A REVELATION? 53 

tation would be that which is found in the mental 
or cerebral organization of the individual. The 
capacity of the human mind as to particular orders 
of truth seems to be as strictly gauged as that of 
a hollow vessel for its contents, or of a musical 
instrument for harmony. The limit of capacity 
may be harder to find, but it seems almost as defi- 
nitely fixed. Most students find that in pure 
mathematics there is a barrier which they may in- 
definitely near, but which no diligence of theirs 
will ever reach or cross. The line of excellence 
is even more sharply drawn in poetic or artistic 
gifts : no matter what eager aspiring, what de- 
voted toil, the average mind stays always in the 
lower rank. There is no reason to doubt that the 
same limitation exists as to man's capacity for 
what we call spiritual truth ; and that this limita- 
tion, whether residing in brain or nerve, or in 
some still more occult and delicate organ of our 
structure, makes one condition of faculty to re- 
ceive what we call a revelation of such spiritual 
truth. Or, if we assume the absolute freedom 
of a Divine Intelligence in selecting the receivers 
and agents of that truth, still it is like the free- 
dom of the artificer who selects a tool because of 
its fitness, or of the commander who knows al- 
ready which officer or man shall be assigned to the 
special service. Only such are direct channels 
for that current of the higher mental life.* Most 
men must accept the revelation of it at second- 
hand : only the highest minds are (so to speak) in 
intellectual touch with the Eternal. 



54 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

We have noticed, perhaps, in persons exception- 
ally gifted in any unusual way, the mark of cer- 
tainty in the exercise of their peculiar gift — espe- 
cially if it is not an attainment won with pains, but 
wells up in their unconscious or spontaneous ac- 
tion. It is — says Renan, speaking of the complex- 
ities of human speech — the peculiar mark of what is 
" spontaneous, " that it knows no such thing as hard 
or easy : the feats of a sleep-walker would amaze 
and terrify him by their sheer impossibility in 
his waking hours. Such gifts are found sometimes 
under structural conditions which we conveniently 
term " nervous " or " magnetic, " — meaning only 
that they are quite unintelligible to us ; they are 
found in acts that show control over wild creat- 
ures, or some forms of morbid excitement, or 
furious insanity ; they appear in oratorical or mil- 
itary genius at its highest pitch. And of the ex- 
ercise of them we observe that it has the same 
unconscious ease and certainty that we remark in 
the movements of an untrained animal, — an ease 
and certainty that can be had by no imitation, 
and are the result of no conscious effort. Such 
cases suggest how easily, how certainly, how in- 
evitably, the Universal Life shapes itself to the 
conditions already existing, amid which it has 
free play. 

It is so, too, with the certainty of some men's per- 
ception of spiritual fact. Socrates has no other 
explanation to give his judges than that he was 
enjoined by " the Divinity " (to Scll/jlqvcov), whose 
voice he was compelled to follow. This compul- 



WHAT IS A REVELATION ? 55 

sion, this certainty, is quite distinct from the 
power of clear ratiocination or accurate definition, 
which make the merit of religious philosophy as 
such. It is the power of simple vision. The 
statements of religious truth are the assertion of 
certain facts, which can be verified by no method 
of proof at second-hand. They must be seen and 
known as facts, or not at all. And this, in our 
modern understanding of such things, means facts 
of actual experience. They must be accepted 
either from direct knowledge of them, or else on 
the authority of persons held to be competent 
witnesses of them. 

The facts lying back of the conscious religious 
life are commonly reckoned to be these : a Divine 
Order embracing all forms of life ; the supremacy 
of Good over Evil in the ultimate laws of being ; 
the Eternal Life, in which is found the comple- 
tion of the destiny of every creature ; the certainty 
of a just Retribution of right and wrong. As to 
these, it is probable that most persons have no 
intuition or first-hand knowledge whatever; while 
there are multitudes — whether we call it knowl- 
edge in them, or whether we call it faith — to 
whom they are clear and evident facts, such that 
it is a light and easy thing, in the assurance of 
them, to undertake any task however hard, to en- 
counter any peril however frightful, to bear any 
burden however grievous. This we call the " power 
of faith " in them. It is, for them, the absolute 
solution of the problem of life, and its crowning 
victory. And to most of us this experience, 



56 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

though known to us only at second-hand, is prob- 
ably the strongest evidence Ave can have of the 
objective verity of those facts of a spiritual order 
on which it rests. 

Still, there are the select few — not for the pres- 
ent to go beyond the bounds of actual experience 
— to whom facts of this order come in a way that 
they can describe only as a direct "revelation," 
a literal removing of a veil, so that they see by 
immediate vision what is hidden to the common 
eye. Of course, such a claim made for or by any- 
body needs to be sifted and examined with honest 
pains. But we need not, for all that, refuse to 
recognize the experience itself, with whatever 
value it may have as a fact of human nature. 
And we may claim to follow strictly the analogy 
of nature and the conditions of certitude in other 
things, if we accept this insight of theirs (duly 
verified and checked) as a veritable revelation to 
ourselves, and acknowledge it as a genuine au- 
thority within its special field of vision. True, 
their experience strictly proves nothing beyond a 
certain condition of the mental or moral life — 
which we may rightly hold to be more precious 
and important than the proof of any external 
" spiritual " realm. Nay, it may be taken in evi- 
dence of an objective realm of being which it 
asserts — as truly as some persons perceive math- 
ematical relations incomprehensible to us, which 
are yet proved to be objectively real, or are sensi- 
tive to impressions that we have never known. It 
is, at all events, as if there were such a realm of 



WHAT IS A REVELATION ? 57 

being — real enough, at any rate, to make a prac- 
tical guide of conduct — of which we are ourselves 
at moments dimly conscious, which we may even 
be in touch with, though blindly or as in the dark, 
which to a few it is given to behold with the 
naked eye. 



IV. 

THE MIRACLE OP LIFE. 

" Are they not all ministering spirits 1 " 

"TIlTE may fairly enough assume that atheism — 
that is, straight-out old-fashioned atheism 
— is out of date. A hundred years ago it was 
common enough to deny that there is any Divine 
mind or life beyond the things we see. But the 
more scientific temper we have to deal with now is 
content to say that whatever power, thought, or 
will there is beyond the range of natural law, is 
inconceivable to our mind, — unknowable, as the 
phrase goes. And so it is. No man in his senses, 
whatever his logic or whatever his creed, will 
pretend that an Infinite Intelligence, or the way of 
its working, can possibly be conceived in human 
thought. We may seem to ourselves to prove, 
logically enough, this and that attribute — omni- 
science, eternity, almightiness — which we say are 
essentially contained in our thought of God; and 
the argument is perfectly sound and good while 
our mind is bent that way. But we find, fashioned 
as we are, that as soon as our mind is unbent, the 
infinite complexity of the universe and of life 
rushes in upon us, and our imagination is baffled 
and overwhelmed. We must get back our sense 
of the nearness and reality of the Divine Life in 



THE MIRACLE OF LIFE. 59 

quite another way. Our life itself, in its countless 
mazes, in the bitter and sweet of its experience, 
in its depths of emotion and lifts of thought ; the 
imagination, nourished and enriched by all we 
have felt and thought and seen and known; the 
soul, with such wealth of capacity and mastery of 
passion as it may have won, — this must, after all, 
make for every man the mirror, which at every 
point reflects some different aspect of the universe, 
and at every turn does something to brighten or 
deepen the picture that images to us the Univer- 
sal Life. To a mind religiously trained that pic- 
ture is what we call "the thought of God." 

The point of view I wish to take is shown in a 
little parable, or apologue (here copied from a 
religious paper of some years back), supposed to 
represent the way a teacher might talk to chil- 
dren about some of the familiar marvels of human 
life. It is there entitled — 

ANGELS. 

Once upon a time, there was a little child so beloved 
by the Queen of Fairies, that she took it into her own 
particular care. And she called her spirits from far and 
near, from the air above and the waters beneath and the 
fields around, and gave the child into their keeping. 

And to one company of them she said, " Build me 
up the body of this dear child in beauty and health. 
Sort out every particle of her food and put it to 
its use, so that this shall run red in the blood, and that 
shall make the flesh supple and firm ; and every hour the 
frame shall grow a little taller and a little stronger, with 
fine grains built in and invisible threads woven together 



60 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

in the exact proportion. See that the hairs of her head 
are all numbered, and that every one is fed through its 
fine tube, that the ringlets may lie elastic and bright 
upon her neck. Of the million and million fibres of the 
frame see that every one is exactly nourished, without 
any confusion, without an instant's neglect or delay. 
Where any part is hurt or worn, see that it is softly dis- 
solved away, without any distress or pain, and fresh ma- 
terial put in its place. Make not one mistake in measure 
or proportion, while the building and the altering go on 
every minute of every day. And see that all is done so 
exactly that she shall grow up by hair's-breadths, daily, 
continually ; and no eye can tell the difference from 
hour to hour, from week to week ; yet after certain 
years she shall be no longer a child but a lovely maiden, 
and after certain other years a beautiful and noble 
woman." And it was so. 

And to another company of her spirits she said, 
"Weave the delicate sunbeam that shall play upon my 
child's cheek. Weave it of innumerable bright colours 
softly blended in one transparent beam, that shall shine 
back brown and golden from the hair, snow-white from 
the clear forehead, blue from the liquid eye, damask from 
the cheek, ruby from the lip. Take [she said] these two 
elements of vapour, one fiery to scorch, the other choking 
to the breath, weigh them out accurately, and mingle them 
to form every dewdrop that moistens her face, and every 
sip of water that gives savour to her food. And for the 
food itself, which is to be dissolved and wrought up into 
frame and fibre and life-giving current of the blood, let 
that be moulded with your nicest skill from salts mingled 
in the earth and particles that float invisible in the air, 
built together and ripened into fruit or grain through the 
long summer days and the balmy nights, — all without 



THE MIRACLE OP LIFE. 61 

haste or rest, as the manner of nature is. And for her 
clothing the silkworm shall spin his thread, and the cotton- 
boll whiten in the sunshine, and the flax plant shall ripen ; 
and the innocent kid shall give his soft skin, and the 
lamb his fleece, and the skill of a hundred artificers shall 
combine, and my darling shall be fed and clothed." And 
it was so. 

But on a day it came to pass that there was an evil 
vapour in the air, or a poison in the food, and the busy 
spirits were troubled and perplexed. The child's blood 
ran hot in fever ; her brow throbbed with pain ; day- 
light glowed in burning crimson on her cheek. The 
fair form lay helpless ; the pulse beat swift and wildly, 
bearing not health but throbs of suffering. Some law 
of that precious life had been broken, ignorantly or 
wilfully, and the ministering spirits were driven back 
as if by some unseen enerny. But only for a time; 
for when the rage of the poison was spent, it was a 
wonder to see how swiftly and with what strange skill 
they thronged back to their task of defending and build- 
ing up again the threatened life. So in a few days the 
fever was abated; the cheek regained its natural hue; 
the breath was cool and sweet again, the step more firm 
and elastic than before. And the fairy guardian, who 
watched all this from her throne where she sat invisible, 
or from where she hovered in the air, silent and unseen, 
saw all that was done, and behold, it was very good. 

In some such parable as this one might try to 
lead a child's thought to see the miracle of life, as 
it is daily fulfilled in every one of us. " He hath 
given his angels charge over thee " says the He- 
brew psalm, " to keep thee in all thy ways. " I do 
not know in the least how all this wonderful thing 



62 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

is done ; and I do not think the very best chemist 
or physiologist could help me at all to understand. 
What is the Power that lives behind that series of 
phenomena (as we call them), which are all that 
our science can tell us anything about ? We call 
fhat Power by the name God, — a name that sim- 
ply lifts our thought from the lower level of knowl- 
edge to the higher level of reverence and trust. 
We are as helplessly ignorant as the youngest 
child, or as the author of the Hebrew psalm from 
which I take those words. The little parable 
which attempts to put that great wonder to child- 
ish fancy does not go in a single phrase beyond 
the facts of the case, as they are rigidly set down 
by chemists and anatomists and physiologists. 
Indeed, it goes but a very little way upon that 
path, crowded with wonders, which they by labo- 
rious investigation are opening to our view. 
What shall we say, for example, of the four hun- 
dred and fifty thousand strands of the optic nerve, 
bearing each its separate message from the world 
without to the world within ? or what of that harp 
of three thousand strings set within the structure 
of the ear, 

" Untwisting all the chains that tie 
The hidden soul of harmony " ? 

Because we are ignorant of the way, shall we 
overlook the wonder of the fact ? Is the miracle 
of life any less real than it seemed to that poet of 
old time who composed the superb strains of this 
ninety-first psalm ? Surely not. Increase of knowl- 
edge onlv widens the horizon of wonder and mvs- 



THE MIRACLE OF LIFE. 68 

tery. The firmament of sky, the depth of waters, 
the caverns of the earth, the marvels of the hu- 
man frame, are far more crowded with mystery 
and awe to us now than they could be in an age 
that only looked timidly and ignorantly upon the 
surface. 

And again : that parable speaks only of the life 
of the body, — as if that were to grow up in mere 
beauty of form, a phantom of delight, a breathing 
statue. It says nothing of the far greater wonder 
(if that were possible) of heart, mind, conscience ; 
how the passions come, and the affections; of 
thought, motive, and educated will. Take them 
as we will, — as mere cerebral phenomena, if we 
choose to call them so ; or as real spiritual facts, 
evincing the growth of a living soul, as our com- 
mon feeling prefers to view them, — and the wonder 
deepens, as when we look through the telescope at 
a cluster of stars. If we try to cover with our 
parable the process we find here, what shall we 
say of the ministering spirits that attend upon 
it, the angels who have this given to their charge ? 
For here we can see even more plainly how it must 
be given in charge of "angels" — that is, intelli- 
gent agents of a higher will. While before we 
had to personify the simple chemical or vital 
forces in air, water, sunshine, vein, nerve, tissue, 
here the forces we deal with are personified al- 
ready, — in the mother's tenderness, the father's 
directing intelligence, the teacher's patient fidel- 
ity, the thousand influences, sympathies, associa- 
tions, of daily companionship. 



64 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

Or if we fancy that these take us a step farther 
away from the Infinite intelligence and power, we 
have only to reflect an instant, to see how each 
soul from which these constant influences ray out 
rests very literally on the bosom of forces bound- 
less and incomprehensible, where we trace as best 
we may the very power and presence of the Al- 
mighty. Nay, think how slight a film it is in which 
all life floats upon this planet. On a ten-inch 
school globe we could hardly spread a thin enough 
coat of varnish to represent the depth of the layer 
of air in which it is possible for human beings to 
live ; and this, laid on in patches here and there, 
to show where they actually do live, covering not 
one-tenth of the globe's surface, all put together. 
In all this boundless universe, those few filmy 
patches on a. ball almost lost to view in the vast 
immensity — those are all that indicate to us the 
range of human life, seen as a portion of that im- 
measurable expanse. All beyond it is — what ? 

There is no need to disparage the amount or the 
value of our knowledge. Its mere growth is a 
wonder and a triumph. Its mere acquisition is 
of inexhaustible relish, as the fit food and stimu- 
lus of the mind. To win it and hold it is our only 
pledge of the control we have over nature, for 
comfort, defence, or gain. Still, outside of that 
narrow thin range just described, it is a bare reg- 
istering of a few physical, mathematical, and 
chemical facts, utterly beyond our reach to grasp 
or modify or control. In that thin layer, be- 
tween the too great grossness of the vapours below 



THE MIRACLE OP LIFE. 65 

and the two great rarity and chill of the air above, 
lies what we call the sphere of our life, — really, a 
little part of the surface of a sphere, — ■ resting 
quite literally on the bosom of unfathomed forces 
beneath, and wrapped about quite literally by a 
universe of unfathomable forces beyond ! 

So to speak, there is nothing for us really to 
understand, except the conditions and laws by 
which our little life is bounded, and which we can 
figure plainest to our thought as the pressure of an 
Almighty Hand upon us. The forces themselves, 
which we name and classify as we can in our study 
of them, — so intelligently controlled, acting with 
such unerring accuracy and skill at every moment, 
on every atom of matter, in every spot of space, 
— it seems no very violent imagery to call them 
agents, messengers, Angels of the Almighty, 
having us in charge. 

We are apt to think of angels as we see them 
in pictures, — mere human creatures etherealized 
and refined, and disfigured with wings; having 
neither the sex of women nor the vigour of men'; 
beings of a fainter and thinner humanity ; the soft 
and sentimental side of our religious imagery. 
But what does the Bible say of them ? "I saw a 
mighty angel come down from heaven clothed with 
a cloud, and a rainbow was about his head ; and 
his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as 
pillars of fire. And he set his right foot upon the 
sea, and his left foot upon the land. And he 
called with a loud voice, and when he called, 
seven thunders uttered their voices ! " What does 

5 



66 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

that magnificent picture mean, but by a splendid 
personification to set forth the grandest and high- 
est that could be conceived of almighty power ? It 
denotes the might and splendour of the immediate 
messenger of Omnipotence. We prefer (it may 
be) the abstract name Force, — a name which 
speaks not to imagination but to reason. We 
speak of the " force " of gravitation or electricity ; 
the " wave-motions " of light or heat. The Bible 
personifies the same thing, and calls the force an 
"angel." We might personify electricity just so, 
if we were great poets too, like the author of the 
Apocalypse. "The winds are God's angels, the 
flash of lightning is his attendant, " says the He- 
brew psalm. And so with all the rest. When 
we say that our life is sustained by forces vast and 
inscrutable, working in ways hidden to us, but al- 
ways and unerringly, with skill far beyond the 
reach of our thought or the cunning of our hand, 
we are saying in our poor way what the Bible says 
in its nobler and grander way : " He hath given his 
angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy 
ways ! " 

One of the chief perplexities of our religious 
thought at the present day, as it appears to me, 
comes from our confusing together three things, 
which in their nature and use are really quite dis- 
tinct: I mean our Science, our Philosophy, and 
our Religion. Each is true in its way; but they 
are true in very different ways. It is the busi- 
ness of science to investigate all that can be found 
out about the things that make up the known 



THE MIRACLE OP LIFE. 67 

world, — their orderly arrangement, succession, 
and so on, — especially what will be of any practi- 
cal use to us. It is the business of philosophy to 
find out, if it can, the original source of these 
things, and what they are in themselves, apart 
from the forms in which they appear to us ; or, in 
default of that, to set them in intelligent order, 
and trace out the laws of thought by which we 
grasp them. But it is the business of religion 
just to take the best symbol it can get of those 
forces — spiritual, moral, vital — which make or 
mar the higher life of man ; and to use it in the 
best way we can, to cultivate the affection, to 
build up the character, to guide the conduct, to 
regenerate the life. 

In these high matters objective truth, saving 
only the priceless truth of human experience, is 
outside our province as it is certainly beyond our 
reach. " We teach the wisdom of God in a mys- 
tery, " says Saint Paul. What is wisdom ? It is 
practical knowledge, — not speculative, not dog- 
matic, not theoretical. What is a mystery ? As 
the word is here used, it is the symbolic expres- 
sion of a truth. We must take the symbol that 
comes nearest home to us. In the Greek myste- 
ries, which Paul doubtless had in mind, the per- 
son to be initiated was first blindfolded, — very 
much as the Lord of our life treats us now, when we 
would look too deeply into the secrets of his power. 

" When o'er these dizzy heights we go, one soft hand blinds 

our eyes ; 
The other leads us safe and slow, O love of God most wise ! " 



68 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

As to the truth of fact behind the mystery, there 
is not the least likelihood that we shall ever, in 
this life, know more about it than we do now. 
We see at least this: that there are intelligence 
and force and hosts of unseen influences, always 
and everywhere present, which, if we weie poets, 
it would be easy to clothe with form, and call 
them Angels, and show how, as in Jacob's vision, 
they are continually ascending and descending 
between us and God. 

We do not know anything about it. But this at 
least it is borne in upon us to take note of : that 
our life is apt enough to be sordid, dull, and sor- 
rowful; and that any view of it which clothes it 
but for a moment, in one of our better moods, 
with living glory, is a strength and a help to our 
frail humanity. 



THE LAW OF JUSTICE. 

" With what judgment ye judge ye shall be judged." 

HPHE phrase " reign of law " is commonly under- 
stood of the processes in nature that show 
an orderly and (as we are apt to call it) necessary 
sequence of phenomena, which we are able, within 
certain limits, to understand, predict, and control. 
It is not commonly applied to what makes up the 
realm of human character and human actions, 
which, whatever our theories about them, we ha- 
bitually think and speak of as contingent and free. 
Or, if we do so apply it, we are apt to find that 
our view of what comes by common consent within 
the range of moral liberty, or is included in what 
we term the " spiritual life, " is cramped and un- 
satisfying, — as untrue to the facts of our higher 
consciousness as (for example) the theories of in- 
organic chemistry would be to explain the vital 
processes of a living body. Thus Herbert Spencer, 
in his Data of Ethics, having already (as he 
thinks) disproved the faculty of moral choice and 
reduced all acts to be the resultant, or trans- 
mutation, of pre-existent force working out me- 
chanically, is obliged to limit himself to calculable 
pleasure or pain as the one moral motive ; to dis- 
parage or condemn those waves of moral enthusi- 



70 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

asm, or self-sacrificing heroism, by which the 
great victories of humanity have been von; and, 
as a final evidence of the inadequacy of his view, 
to scoff and repudiate as mere nonsense the dic- 
tum which he cites from Carlyle, that "a man 
can do without happiness, and instead thereof find 
blessedness. " 

Now in our ethics the religious experience of 
mankind fills the same function that poetry or 
imagination does in the realm of natural science: 
it is the pioneer of the accurate intellectual de- 
scription given in science or philosophy. Reli- 
gion, in its higher forms, has always recognized a 
"law of the spirit of life" as distinct from "the 
law that is in our members ; " and a few words 
touching the nature or bearing of that law * from 
the point of view of human experience may not be 
needless at the present stage of the discussion. 

For some fifty years or more — dating, I should 
say, from the currency given to Combe's Consti- 
tution of Man — there has prevailed a more or less 
popular view of what we may call the physical 
law of retribution, as if it filled all the space, and 
embraced all the penalties, that were once held to 
belong to the domain of theology. It was supposed 
to cover the whole ground when it pointed out 
the certain consequences of certain acts : when it 
showed how a drunkard will certainly rain his 
health, and a spendthrift his fortune ; how a liar 
will lose people's confidence; how an ugly temper 
will make enemies ; and so on. 

* Or "method," vo/ios'. not 6ecrp6s, "enactment." 



THE LAW OF JUSTICE. 71 

Doubtless all this was a very important and in- 
structive thing to say, when the theological argu- 
ment was only beginning to wear thin. Further, 
it has gained great weight, range, and force, as we 
have come to understand better the laws of life 
in our own constitution and in the constitution of 
things round us. But it shows us only one side 
of the subject, — the obvious, the superficial, al- 
most we might say the coarse and rude side of it. 
It warns very powerfully against the gross vices, 
such as drunkenness and debauchery. It discour- 
ages knavery and cruelty, which make a man, se- 
cretly or openly, the enemy of other men. And 
this is well, so far as it goes. 

Still, it warns against these things* very much 
in the same way as it warns against unwholesome 
food, or change of weather, or bad investments in 
business. The virtue of mere prudence, which is 
all it teaches, is not only not the highest sort of vir- 
tue, — though it is the same in kind that the popu- 
lar religion often stops with, — but it has no charm 
in it, and little honour. Men's sympathies run out 
to the frank vice and frank contrition of the prodi- 
gal, more than to his elder brother's thrifty and cal- 
culating obedience. The " law of the spirit " which 
we have spoken of goes deeper, and touches more 
powerfully the real springs of life. An ordinary 
historian can trace out for us the series of events 
that show how an unscrupulous ambition, crowned 
with every success, leads on to deeper stakes and 
unintended crimes, till it culminates in some 
fatal disaster, such as Waterloo or Sedan. But it 



72 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

takes a great poet and dramatist to show how the 
same ambition, in the noon of its success, is after 
all the wreck and despair of the life : as when 
Lady Macbeth says, 

" Nought 's had, all 's spent, 
"When our desire is got, without content." 

As soon as we attempt to follow out the line 
of thought which this suggests, we are arrested at 
two or three points of view, which should be firmly 
held to in considering how to meet the sophisms 
which beset the current religious argument on the 
subject. 

In the first place, with our modern habits of 
thought, it is absolutely necessary that we should 
discard the notion of anything arbitrary in what 
we call the Divine reward of virtue or penalty of 
guilt. No doubt, what we speak of, ignorantly, as 
" laws of nature " have been appointed (to speak 
after the manner of men) with intelligence, fore- 
thought, and distinct purpose, — the laws which 
govern the results of good and evil in human 
character, as much as those which govern, for ex- 
ample, the relations of carbon and oxygen in pro- 
ducing the vital heat of the body. The thing to 
be observed is that to our mind all the laws of life 
are ultimate, and have nothing arbitrary about 
them. They are what they are by what we may 
call a Divine Necessity. That is, we cannot pos- 
sibly think of their being other than what they 
are. To our mind they are simply the expression 
of the ultimate constitution of things, -so far as 



THE LAW OF JUSTICE. 73 

conceivable by us; so that it is absolutely impos- 
sible to follow out in our imagination the conse- 
quences that would ensue from the smallest change 
in that actual constitution of things, physical or 
moral : if, for example, the air we breathe were 
one-fourth part oxygen, instead of being (what it 
is) about one-fifth. 

It is not of the slightest consequence, in this 
view, whether that constitution of things is the 
best possible or the worst possible. Indeed, it is 
not clear whether these phrases, which figure so 
much in some schools of philosophy, have any in- 
telligible meaning to our mind. No doubt we can 
easily enough imagine a more fertile soil, a pleas- 
anter climate, a more orderly and happier state of 
society, and so on. Here, we are simply dealing 
by comparison with what is known and familiar. 
But the instant we come to the " laws " (that is, 
the ultimate conditions) by which these things are 
determined, — gravitation, evaporation, sympathy, 
retribution, — we come upon ground bordering di- 
rectly on the unknown and unknowable; ground 
where we have simply to accept the fact ; ground 
which we cannot by any possibility conceive to be 
other than it is, while earth is earth or man is 
man. 

In like manner, whatever our opinion may be 
about any of the laws that affect our moral life, 
we cannot rest until we have divested them to our 
thought of any smallest appearance or remnant of 
an arbitrary character. Thus a child needs to be 
told that a lie is wrong, and, if need be, that it 



74 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

must be punished by parental discipline. An 
average man needs to be practically convinced 
that dishonesty is an evil thing to him, — if neces- 
sary, by shutting him up for years in prison, which 
implies a complicated apparatus of courts and 
judges. To teach men of a rude time that false- 
hood at heart is a baleful and fatal thing, it was 
necessary to carry over the same machinery of 
courts and a Supreme Judge to the invisible world, 
and to say that " liars shall have their portion in 
a lake of fire and brimstone," — however we inter- 
pret those awful words. But, taken carnally, that 
is not the kind of imagery that impresses us now. 
And we shall never be satisfied with our own 
opinion as to the judgment that follows wilful 
falsehood, until we see it as an ultimate fact in 
human life constituted as it is, just as unerring 
and just as little arbitrary as that which regulates 
the consumption of carbon and oxygen in evolving 
the vital heat. 

In the second place, we must disconnect — that 
is to say, logically disconnect — the penalty of 
guilt from any notion of suffering, such as is 
either arbitrary in its infliction, or can be made 
apparent to observation or taken into our calcula- 
tion of consequences. Now this dissociation of 
suffering, arbitrary or calculable or apparent, 
from guilt is one which our thought strongly 
rebels against. It seems even an outrage upon 
our natural sense of justice. And yet not only is 
it the fact which constantly meets us in the expe- 
rience of life, but we must come to it squarely, face 



THE LAW OF JUSTICE. 75 

to face, if we would succeed in seeing the whole 
thing in its true light. For example, the conse- 
quences of drunkenness or licentiousness, which are 
so often made (and rightly made) the type of God's 
moral judgments, are by no means the penalty of 
the guilt of drunkenness or lust. They are sim- 
ply the expression of a physiological fact. They 
are the natural, but by no means constant or un- 
avoidable, sequence of a definite act ; and some of 
the worst of them are perhaps oftenest suffered by 
the innocent, not the guilty. As the old phrase 
ran, they " work corruption of blood. " The fathers 
have eaten sour grapes, and it is the children's 
teeth that are set on edge, — which it would not 
be if it were spiritual law we were dealing with, 
not a simple fact of physiology. With a little 
prudence, the guiltiest person of all will some- 
times keep all his vices and — so far as another 
eye can see — escape all their consequences. 

And again, if we think of suffering as the real 
penalty of guilt, we are confounded at once by 
finding that the innocent suffer full as much as the 
guilty, — perhaps more. " On the whole, " writes 
an observer who has given much thought to sub- 
jects of this nature, " the most pitiful object I saw 
once in a great hospital, which gathered up the 
wrecks of the city's debauchery, was a little infant 
born there blind, — its blood poisoned at birth, and 
its "bones rotten by the sin of its progenitors; so 
that it could at best linger a few weeks in blind 
misery, and then be laid in an unpitied grave, hav- 
ing never tasted once the sweet joy of life." 



76 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

Master, said the disciples, who did sin, this man 
or his parents, that he was born blind ? Neither 
this man nor his parents, said Jesus ; but that the 
works of God should be made manifest in him. 
That was his way of saying that suffering as such 
is not the penalty of guilt as such. The " work of 
God "to be made manifest in the blind man was 
what ? It was, simply, to cure his blindness. 

Now it is just here that " we have the mind of 
Christ. " It is none of our business to be theoriz- 
ing about the ultimate source or the reason of hu- 
man suffering. Our only business with it is to 
prevent it if we can, and to heal it when we can. 
One great passionate outcry has gone up from the 
heart of man since the beginning, echoed alike by 
Job and Isaiah, by iEschylus and Homer, by 
Tennyson and Carlyle; but no answer better 
than that has ever come, or probably ever will. 
An inflammation in a spot no bigger than a pin- 
point strikes the sensitive nerve of eye or ear; 
and your innocent child — to-night perhaps — shall 
suffer agonies that stir in your heart all that bitter, 
helpess sense of the mystery of pain. As to that 
mystery, as just said, there is no other apparent 
answer possible than this : that our only business 
with suffering is to soothe it when we can, to pre- 
vent it if we can, and to heal it where we can. 

Once for all, if we will deal at all with a matter 
so serious as guilt and its penalty, we must learn not 
to confound that penalty with the pain that afflicts 
guilty and innocent alike. It was of One con- 
ceived spotless as a Lamb of God that it was said, 



THE LAW OF JUSTICE. 77 

"The chastisement of our peace was laid upon 
him, and with his stripes we are healed. " It is 
the tender-hearted, compassionate, and pure, that 
really feel the awful burden of the suffering and sin 
that oppress mankind. To live comfortably through 
life, — to escape that great burden of sorrow and 
pain, — two things, it has been rather cynically 
said, are chiefly requisite : a hard heart and a 
good digestion. Such words mock, perhaps, our 
easy and childlike notion, that the good should be 
made — divinely or artificially — happy, and the 
bad — divinely or artificially — miserable. In 
this life, once for all, it is no such thing. Not 
that certain moral qualities — as amiability, gen- 
erosity, content of mind — do not contribute to life's 
happiness : indeed they do, as certainly and plainly 
as fresh air and sunshine to bodily health. Not 
that certain immoral qualities — as idleness, envy, 
ill-regulated passion — do not contribute to life's 
misery: indeed they do, as surely as poisons in 
the air bring fever. But these are only incidents. 
They are fringes, as it were, to that great web 
of mingled delight and pain which constitutes our 
experience of life. 

God makes his sun of gladness, so far as we can 
see, rise impartially on the evil and on the good ; 
and sends his rains of sorrow, so far as we can 
see, equally upon the just and on the unjust. 
That is, the surface gladness and the surface pain, 
which are all that our eyes can see, are distrib- 
uted with absolute impartiality, so far as moral 
merit is concerned. Who supposes that the un- 



78 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

distinguished crowd of victims in a great war, — 
who suffer anguish of terror, rending of house- 
holds, destruction of property, pangs of starvation, 
miseries of pestilence, outrage of person, and 
eclipse of life, — who supposes that they have de- 
served worse of the Almighty than the victorious 
commanders, who have the glories of conquest, or 
the beaten commanders, who have at least the sol- 
ace of compliment and compassion in their defeat ? 
And, if we would think of it, the enormous misery 
that results from this one single source, wars of 
policy and ambition, is so vast as utterly to over- 
whelm and confound whatever notion we can frame 
of those milder distresses, which are all that most 
of us know of human wretchedness. 

The prodigious question, then, of the suffering 
which mankind endure, or are capable of endur- 
ing, we must set absolutely aside from our view, 
when we deal with the law of the spirit of life, as 
helping to explain the Divine compensations of 
evil or good as such. 

And, still further, we shall not find that it 
helps us at all in our understanding of it, when 
we carry over that suffering, retributively, to our 
notion of another life. Pain by way of arbitrary 
infliction will never reconcile itself to the judg- 
ment or conscience of a reasonable man. Our nat- 
ural first feeling about it is doubtless different 
from this. Revenge, which Lord Bacon calls "a 
sort of wild justice," demands eye for eye, tooth 
for tooth, pang for pang. And that rude sense 
of justice in us all is justified, no doubt, at any- 



THE LAW OF JUSTICE. 79 

thing which seems (as it were) the very reflex of a 
criminal act, as when a wife-beater is heartily 
flogged on the bare back. But, if we will think of 
it, the flogging of a wife-beater is mercifully meant 
to save other men's wives ; it is a punishment that 
speaks sharply to the coarse understanding of men 
who are capable of beating their wives ; it is not 
meant revengefully, to wreak the anger of the 
State. It would surely be a pitiful thing for the 
great, rich, strong State, made up of hundreds of 
thousands of people, to act revengefully upon a 
criminal whom it had got safe in its grasp and re- 
duced to helplessness. The general security alone 
justifies the law's severity. 

Just so with the dispensations of another life. 
It does not satisfy in the least our sense of abso- 
lute justice that an Almighty Being- — we will not 
say forever, since that is too horrible, beyond all 
range of imagination, to think of for a moment, 
in its hard, implacable malignity — should, inflict 
we will even say one single pang, by act of arbi- 
trary will, upon a creature absolutely helpless and 
unresisting, on account of guilt alike unrepented 
and (as we must recollect) unhindered in a previ- 
ous state. We may, on the other hand, very easily 
conceive that such a soul, stripped naked, as it 
were, of all defences, and looking back on a course 
of evil in a light hitherto unimagined and unsus- 
pected, — we may easily conceive that such a soul 
should undergo flames and agonies of remorse at 
the mere fact of its wilful alienation from infinite 
purity and right, typified truly enough in the im- 



80 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

agery of parable and apocalypse, feebly paralleled 
by the like tortures that have scourged conyicted 
offenders here. Such a destiny as that may very 
veil enter into our conception of a future life, 
when ye try to apply to it the spiritual law we 
seem to discern in the present life. But we must 
first of all conceive it as the working out of that 
spiritual law: it is as essentially and necessa- 
rily part of our human constitution as those rela- 
tions of carbon and oxygen in the blood, which 
evolve the vital heat of the body. 

Such a view of the subject, furthermore, is in 
harmony with those methods of thinking which 
are now everywhere accepted as sound, and is de- 
manded by them. If these methods are right any- 
where, they certainly are in the department of 
theology, which, properly understood, is the reflex 
in philosophic thought of one special range of hu- 
man experience. Accepting so much, we have, 
then, brought this matter round upon the ground 
where it has got to stand, if it is going to have any 
real or permanent value as part of our religious 
thought. In brief, either there is a good and a 
bad, a better and a worse, for us, or there is not. 
And by this we must mean a good and a bad, a 
better and a worse, entirely aside from the sense 
of calculable pleasure or pain. The real good in 
life, its true and highest good, is what all grave 
thinkers are agreed in calling moral or spiritual 
good; that is, it belongs not to sensation, but to 
the quality of the soul. The deadly enemy of such 
a view is the method of thinking known by such 



THE LAW OF JUSTICE. 81 

fine names as eudaemonism, or hedonism, or Epi- 
cureanism. Under all these fine names — nay, 
even though the sense of them should be expanded 
and glorified into an eternity of selfish bliss — it 
is the doctrine of Belial as opposed to the gospel 
of Christ. Religion always assumes that there is 
such a higher good, quite irrespective of pleasure 
or pain ; carrying this so far, sometimes, as to say 
that the real test of fitness for salvation is willing- 
ness to be cast off from all joy forever, out of 
pure loyalty to God. 

The utmost that can be claimed for pleasure as 
the reward of virtue is that on the whole, out of 
innumerable instances, it will be found that the 
preponderance in the long run is in favour of virtue 
as against vice, as a source of human happiness 
or satisfaction, — for the individual a slender and 
doubtful preponderance, while immensely great 
for society at large. As a voice to the soul, we 
must take rather the splendid paradox that has 
been already cited from Carlyle : " There is in 
man a higher than the love of happiness. He 
can do without happiness, and instead thereof find 
blessedness ! " 

But I should be afraid, in the name of relig- 
ion or common-sense or general experience, to 
promise a young person, in the bewilderment and 
whirl of life, in the maze of passion and tempta- 
tion, — I should be afraid to promise that he will 
have more pleasure in virtuous self-denial. How 
do I know ? How can I compare ? Our standard 
of such things shifts as we get to middle life. I 

6 



82 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

have heard of persons who affected to look at the 
whole thing deliberately, who deliberately chose 
the pleasures of profligacy, and to take their 
chance. How, on their ground, could I gainsay 
them ? I could, it is true, warn them of the certain 
horrors of certain forms of profligacy; — though 
even these will not deter a man of stronger passion 
than judgment. But, by a little discretion, he may 
perhaps avoid those horrors without forfeiting the 
indulgence. 

Now I do not say that I could deal with such a 
person any better by reasoning from principles of 
pure virtue. Probably not. But at least I can 
avoid the mistake of attempting to deal with him 
on unsound principles — on ground that will not 
bear the heavy pressure of fact. And, for persons 
whom I can impress — young children, for in- 
stance, and inexperienced persons who are really 
trying to do right, and those who know they have 
gone wrong and really wish to be set right, — for 
these I can at least avoid a falsehood and a fallacy 
in dealing with them. For all such, I am per- 
fectly sure that the true method is to inculcate 
right because it is right, not because it is profitable ; 
to warn against wrong because it is wrong, not be- 
cause it is unprofitable. 

Moreover, I think the natural mind and heart 
answer quite as quickly to the right — or what 
seems so, as to the pleasant or expedient — or 
what seems so. Or as St. Paul urges, Religion 
ought to set a mark at least as high as a prize- 
fighter, who will let himself be battered to death in 



THE LAW OF JUSTICE. 83 

the ring sooner than show himself a coward or own 
himself beaten. I am not at all sure that the desire 
of right is so much weaker. Nay, I am sure that in 
a healthy natural mind the desire of right is far 
stronger than the desire of pleasure or happiness. 
This is doubtless what Jesus meant when he said, 
" He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that 
loseth his life shall save it. " These paradoxes are 
the common-sense of the loyal soul. 

Now there is a sphere and quality of life, call 
it what we will, — wisdom, as Solomon called it ; 
or self-control (aco^pocrvvr)), as Socrates called it; 
or virtue, as the Stoics called it ; or moral excel- 
lence, as we say in our homely English ; but what 
we like best to call by those noble Scripture 
names, love, joy, peace, spiritual life, kingdom of 
heaven, in one word, blessedness, — which is the 
best thing for us, constituted as we are. If a man 
has the least notion of such a sphere of life, or a 
belief that it exists, he necessarily feels after it, 
struggles towards it, as plants towards sunlight. 
We need not quarrel with any one who prefers to 
translate by so tame a word as " pleasure " that 
abounding joy, that deep peace, that expanding 
life, in which this " blessedness " consists, pro- 
vided only he recognize the fact. If we do not 
so recognize it, then so much the worse for us. 
Not that it is a sin, which will be visited by a 
specific penalty; but that it is a sort of "outer 
darkness," — a blindness, a sickness, an impotency 
of the soul. 

Now this, as we have already hinted, is not a 



84 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

matter of speculation or dogma ; it is a fact of hu- 
man experience. And it is this fact of human 
experience that gives its significance to our cus- 
tomary religious phraseology. Thus, "Heaven," 
says Dr. Hedge, u is the sum-total of ascending 
spirits; hell is the sum-total of descending spir- 
its. " In these ranges of experience we do not talk 
about reward or punishment. The glory and the 
joy are in the higher life itself. The gloom and 
pain are the forfeiture of that life. The arduous 
struggles by which it is won are not " merit, " by 
which it is earned as a reward. They are but in- 
cidents of the climbing, a cheap price for the glory 
of the ascent. They are no more than the painful 
steps one climbs to view the splendours of a moun- 
tain sunrise; no more than the price which that 
man paid who " with joy sold all that he had " so 
as to buy that " pearl of great price " which this 
kingdom of heaven had become to him. 

Plainly enough, if Religion is to regain in an 
age of reason anything of the power over men's 
lives which it is held to have lost since the " ages 
of faith," it must be not by bringing down its 
claims to the lower level of a speculative opinion 
or a carnal prudence, but by making plain those 
facts in its own domain, which are just as real 
and certain as the facts of astronomy or physiol- 
ogy. These facts lie in a region of experience 
which it has been too much the fashion of late to 
disregard, in an eager grasping at the glittering 
generalities of science, or in the efforts of a practi- 
cal philanthropy, or in the allurements of mate- 



THE LAW OF JUSTICE. 85 

rial, political, and social progress. Everything 
that is certain in this world comes to us from go- 
ing back upon the primary facts of experience. 
And it is for Religion, just as much as it is for 
any department of the sciences of observation, to 
assert and defend very jealously that particular 
domain of experience which is rightfully its own. 
Finally, something like the thought which we 
have here attempted to express we believe was in 
the mind of Paul when he wrote those noble 
words : The law of the Spirit of life in Christ 
Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and 
death. 



VI. 

THE LAW OP SACRIFICE. 

" He that loseth liis life shall save it unto life eternal." 

HpHERE is a sentence of Saint Paul which has 
often come to my mind in a way to make it 
seem very puzzling and inconsequent. He is made 
to say, in our common version (Rom. v. 7), "For 
scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet 
peradventure for a good man some would even 
dare to die. " This, as it stands, is flatly unmean- 
ing. I certainly cannot understand it; and I do 
not think the translators understood it, either, or 
else they would have made it more intelligible. 
Naturally, then, I turn to the Revisers, to see 
what they have made of it ; but I do not find that 
they understood it any better, for, in the latter 
half of the verse (which is what particularly puz- 
zles me), they only change it to this : " for perad- 
venture for the good man [or, for the Holy Spirit] 
some one would even dare to die." The paradox 
and the fatuity remain just what they were before ; 
simply, we can give a better guess at what the 
Greek may possibly have been, — at least in the 
two words "for" and "the." 

I now do what I ought to have done at first, and 
turn to my Greek text. And here I begin to find 



THE LAW OF SACRIFICE. 87 

a little light. For I notice that (in the latter half 
of the verse) the verb means "dares," and cannot 
possibly mean " would dare ; " that its subject is not 
"some," or "some one," but rather "any one," 
as in the earlier half ; and that for the phrase ren- 
dered " a (or, the) good man " the literal meaning 
is "the Good," or some other expression (as "the 
good cause") denoting pure quality. But espe- 
cially I note that for the strange and unmeaning 
term " peradventure " it would be a much more 
natural rendering to say " swiftly, " or " promptly. " 
And, putting these hints together, I seem to find 
a meaning like this : that, while it may be hard 
to find one willing to die for a point of mere in- 
dividual right, yet any man braves death readily 
where a point of conscience or personal honour is 
concerned. * And in this, instead of the vague and 
paradoxical assertion that puzzled me before, I 
have a meaning that is both intelligible and noble. 
I do not know what the commentators say about 
it, but this, it seems to me, is what Paul him- 

* The verse as it stands in Greek is as follows : p,6\is yap vnep 
dcKaiov tis drrodavelrac ' vnep yap rov ayaOov t d\a tls /col ro\pa 
cLTToOavfTiv. It will be seen that the interpretation turns on the 
ambiguous meaning of rdxa, to which I have given what seems 
to me its more natural interpretation. To make sure, however, 
I sent the text to a friend, a very eminent professor of Greek, 
who replies as follows : " Not knowing the context, I should 
be inclined to understand it thus : ' For one will hardly die for 
what is just, and yet one may easily venture to die for the 
Good.' Is it an argument for elevating the good, to dyadov, 
in Plato's sense, above the [special] virtues ? The omission of 
the article with dmaiov and not with dyaOov suggests this." 



88 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

self says, — certainly, a far manlier and nobler 
sentiment than what his translators have given 
him credit for. 

For. as vre cannot fail to see. the meaning we 
had first found has something in it quite pitiful 
and craven. It seems to show that when the words 
were written the spirit of sacrifice — in the sense 
of devotion to duty — which we are so familiar 
with, both in its humblest and its grandest forms, 
was quite in its infancy. It seems to show a 
clinging to life and a dread of death, in men's av- 
erage temper, which we should call mean and 
dastardly. It would appear a piece of almost in- 
credible heroism, that one should risk his life for 
the noblest cause or the noblest leader ! 

Now I need not speak here of the Christian mar- 
tyrs, whom these very words of Paul — leading up 
as they do to his noble exhortation. " I beseech 
you by the mercies of God that ye give your bodies 
a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which 
is your reasonable service" — were helping to edu- 
cate up to that high pitch of moral daring. We 
are well used to the same thing in other shapes, 
and nearer home. There are the old familiar 
stories of feudal devotion of clansmen for their 
chief: nay, only a few weeks ago more than one 
loyal subject offered his own life, if by any mira- 
cle of surgery it might be made effective to save 
the dying Emperor of Germany. There is the ab- 
solute self-surrender of the Nihilists of our day 
for a cause that seems to us not holy at all. but 
very atrocious — save for this one quality, of in- 



THE LAW OF SACRIFICE. 89 

spiring such devotion. There was the humble 
heroism of that negro boatman in the war, who 
said, very simply, " Somebody has got to die, and 
it may as well be me," and so cast off the boat 
under a storm of shot that instantly struck him 
down. Every year, it is likely, there are scores 
of firemen, who take their lives in their hand, 
knowingly, to rescue those helpless in the flames ; 
of railway engineers, who go open-eyed into the 
jaws of death, hoping by their own risk to save the 
train; of pilots and ship-captains, who will not 
quit the post of danger while one life may possibly 
be saved. A case happened the other day which 
shows exactly what all this means, which we prob- 
ably all saw in the papers at the time, and most 
of us have forgotten since, in the crowd of news- 
paper horrors : an apothecary's clerk, having to 
unpack a carboy of nitric acid, found that by 
some defect in the glass or the packing the acid 
had escaped ; and, in doing what he could to save 
others from the deadly fumes, he inhaled them 
himself and died that night, giving his body a liv- 
ing sacrifice, which was his reasonable service, 
doubtless — as an apothecary's clerk. In short, 
Saint Paul appears to be arguing with a far lower 
temper of mind than what we all know by exam- 
ples so familiar, which we may fairly enough call 
the fruit of that Christian training the world has 
lived under for these eighteen and a half centuries 
since Jesus lived and died. 

I need not, then, go on with Saint Paul's argu- 
ment, to show how that voluntary sacrifice of 



90 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

Jesus bridged over (so to speak) the unfathomable 
gulf between man and God, and served somehow as 
a " reconciliation " and " propitiation " for us ; so 
that, however guilty in his own esteem, one might 
take heart from that high example, and approach 
the Eternal Judge without abject terror and with 
some good hope. We sometimes, indeed, hear it 
said by the rationalism of our day that it was by 
his example, not by his sacrifice, that Jesus saved 
the world from its burden of despair and guilt. 
But, if we look at the evidence of any of those 
earlier centuries when the struggle was most visi- 
bly going on, we shall find that the record of his 
actual life was almost wholly lost sight of : such a 
thing as to find a human example in him is (so far 
as I remember) quite unknown; while the one 
point continually put before the believer's con- 
science is the wonder of that great sacrifice, — 
not at all in its modern " vicarious " sense, but in 
its purely moral quality, of willingly laying aside 
the greatest splendour and power, to assume the 
lowest service and to die a slave's death upon the 
cross. In this sense, as those records will show, 
that sacrifice made the central thought and power 
of the first Christian ages. And, that we may rate 
this great moral fact at its just value, we should 
try to understand, if we can, the temper of mind 
to which Paul speaks. 

It seems probable that the ancient conviction of 
the value and efficiency of sacrifice, as a means of 
placating the Deity, may have had to do with what 
we call the Oriental feeling of a sovereign's abso- 



THE LAW OF SACRIFICE. 91 

lute right to dispose of his subjects' lives. This 
Oriental feeling I will illustrate by two anecdotes 
out of Herodotus. When Xerxes was setting out 
on his expedition into Greece, a certain prince, 
who had shown the monarch magnificent hospi- 
tality, begged as a special favour that the youngest 
of his six sons might be allowed to stay at home 
to comfort his old age; upon which the king or- 
dered the heads of all six to be struck off and set 
on stakes on the two sides of the way by which 
the host was to march, as a warning that no man 
might with impunity speak of right or favour 
where the Sovereign was concerned. Again, as he 
returned to Asia from that disastrous expedition 
in a single crowded ship, which laboured in a 
storm, and the captain said it was impossible that 
so many should be saved, Xerxes appealed to his 
lords and nobles on board to devote themselves for 
their king, — which (forgetful or unmindful of that 
insolent act of cruelty) they instantly did, paying 
him reverence, and plunging into the wild sea; 
then, landing safe, he first rewarded the captain's 
skill with a golden crown, but directly after or- 
dered him to be beheaded, as having caused the 
death of so many Persian nobles. 

These stories show us that Asiatic notion of ab- 
solute sovereignty, which in all its essentials is 
held there to-day. By a recent report the Shah of 
Persia, who is the successor to the throne of Xer- 
xes, has only begun this very year to show a sense 
that the sovereign may have duties as well as 
rights. We have to do however, not with that, 



92 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

but with the religious idea of sacrifice it led to. 
And here let us look at a few examples. 

The patriarch Abraham had it borne in on him 
(as we should say to-day) that to insure the favour 
of his deity he must kill his own son and burn 
his body on a hilltop on a heap of stones, — the 
regular way of sacrifice; and he created a new era 
of religious sentiment by coming through a deeper 
insight to see it in a different light, and daring to 
set a humaner example. Thus the sacrifice of Isaac 
— as it is sometimes very improperly called — is in 
our modern critical view a legend or myth, telling 
in a way partly fictitious how that step was made 
from the dismal superstition of human sacrifice in 
its most pitiful form, the offering of the oldest 
child upon the altar. But, though the form was 
left behind, the idea has remained. Fathers and 
mothers, during our civil war, offered up their sons 
" on the altar of their country " with a feeling as 
distinctly, solemnly, tenderly sacrificial as that we 
ascribe to " the father of the faithful. " In a more 
consciously literal sense we find the old thought 
colouring the entire argument of " Romans " and 
" Hebrews " where they speak of the death of Jesus. 
Down even to this day, the vocabulary of " revival 
melodies " reeks with the thought of blood, — the 
blood of human sacrifice. 

We have little occasion, at the present stage of 
liberal exegesis, to discuss the theological idea — 
which is little more at this day than the ghost of 
an idea — of vicarious sacrifice in its stricter sense. 
But there is also a human idea, a point of human 



THE LAW OF SACRIFICE. 93 

character and experience, represented in the phrase 
"sacrifice and reconciliation," or "reconciliation 
by sacrifice," which we may briefly reflect upon 
to our advantage. 

I will begin by copying an illustration from Mr. 
Kuskin. Now Mr. Ruskin is apt to take a view 
of things which seems to most of us wildly ideal 
and unpractical. But his view is at the same 
time in itself a very lofty one, while his lan- 
guage in setting it forth is often both superbly elo- 
quent and austerely noble. In fact, if we wish to 
see what the Gospel code of morals really is, and 
how it applies to common things, we might look 
far before we found a teacher to whom we could 
go so well. Here is his illustration of what we 
mean by sacrifice : — 

Five great intellectual professions, relating to daily ne- 
cessities of life, have hitherto existed, and these exist 
necessarily in every civilized nation : the Soldier's pro- 
fession is to defend it ; the Pastor's, to teach it ; the Phy- 
sician's, to keep it in health ; the Lawyer's, to enforce 
justice in it ; the Merchant's, to provide for it. 

And the duty of all these men is, on due occasion, to 
die for it. On due occasion : that is, the Soldier, rather 
than leave his post in battle ; the Physician, rather than 
leave his post in plague ; the Pastor, rather than teach 
falsehood ; the Lawyer, rather than countenance injustice ; 
the Merchant, — what is his due occasion of death ? It 
is the main question for the merchant, as for all of us. 
For, truly, the man who does not know when to die, does 
not know how to live. 

Passing over what is here said of the merchant's 
double function, as a dealer in commodities and 



94 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

as an employer of other men, and the way the rule 
of integrity is exhibited in each, we come to what 
follows : — 

Supposing the captain of a frigate saw it right, or were 
by any chance obliged, to place his own son in the posi- 
tion of a common sailor ; — as he would then treat his 
son, he is bound always to treat every one of the men 
under him. So, also, supposing the master of a manu- 
factory saw it right, or were by any chance obliged, to 
place his own son in the position of an ordinary workman ; 
— as he would then treat his son, he is bouud always to 
treat ever}' one of his men. This is the only effective, 
true, or practical rule which can be given on this point 
of political economy. 

And as the captain of a ship is bound to be the last 
man to leave his ship in case of wreck, and to share his 
last crust with the sailors in case of famine, so the manu- 
facturer, in any commercial crisis or distress, is bound to 
take the suffering of it with his men, and even to take 
more of it for himself than he allows his men to feel ; a3 
a father would, in a famine, shipwreck, or battle, sacrifice 
himself for his son. 

Here we are arrested by these words: sacrifice 
himself for Ms so?i, — which is here spoken of as a 
thing of course, and which we feel to be a thing 
of course. But what a long way we have advanced 
from the idea of Abraham's time, when it was 
thought a natural and right thing for a father 
to sacrifice his son for himself ! Even as far down 
as Micah, fifteen hundred years later (to trust the 
common reckoning), it is spoken of as quite a pos- 
sible thing that a man should give "the fruit of 
his body for the sin of his soul," — that is, kill 



THE LAW OP SACRIFICE. 95 

his own child for a scruple of conscience or an 
act of worship; and against it the prophet urges 
that all the Lord requires of us is " to do justly 
and love mercy and walk humbly with our God. " 

But at any rate we see this : that the idea and 
the need of sacrifice are not outgrown in modern 
life. So far from that, it is the element of sacri- 
fice that more than anything else makes a man's 
life moral, — something better than that of a well- 
trained animal. Even the simplest, easiest, com- 
monest, pleasantest duty, done as duty, has that 
element in it. More than any other, it is the 
mark of a true nature, that when the moment 
comes to make the sacrifice, it is made (as Paul 
says) promptly, cheerfully, and without hesitation, 
— just as a brave soldier does not hesitate, when 
the order is given to advance ; just as a true father 
or mother does not hesitate, when personal comfort 
or indulgence must be given up for the benefit of a 
sick child. The virtue of the act consists in re- 
nouncing something: that is Goethe's own hint of 
the pivot of a manly discipline. Even those very 
relations of human life which are most absolutely 
founded in mutual love and trust — the relation of 
husband and wife, of brother and sister, of parent 
and child — are not at all fulfilled by indulging the 
sentiment so natural and sweet, but are precisely 
those which most constantly demand the sacrifice 
of present feeling or interest or comfort to instant 
duty. One is constantly struck, in diaries, let- 
ters, or other records of the Puritans, with the 
austerity of the sense of duty on one side, con- 



96 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

trasted with the extreme tenderness of family 
affection on the other. Nay, without something 
of that austere savour, those relations can no more 
be kept true and sweet than food without salt. 
We do not see the salt ; we do not taste it, as such ; 
but we know by the wholesome flavour that it is 
there, in every particle of the food. Much more, 
"every sacrifice is seasoned with salt." Mere 
sympathy and affection, the placid, kindly flow of 
family love without break, jar, or difference — 
such as we like to dream of, such as we find in 
the " goody-goody " class of sentimental stories — 
is in most cases, probably in all cases, mere illu- 
sion but for that saving salt. And the disappoint- 
ments of domestic life, which make the great 
staple of modern introspective novels, come thick- 
est, fastest, and worst where — as in the lawless 
" Bohemia " of continental fiction — love is re- 
garded as a sentiment to be indulged, not as a 
quality to be ripened under training, a quality that 
requires daily sacrifice not only for, but to the ob- 
ject it lays hold on. The lamp that shines clearest 
and steadiest upon our daily walk is what Ruskin 
has so well called " the Lamp of Sacrifice. " 

But I wish to keep as close as I can to the reli- 
gious motive and thought we started with. And so 
I come to consider what we may call the response 
in the soul, or the correlative in the religious life, 
of the idea of sacrifice : that is, the idea of recon- 
ciliation or redemption. 

Reconciliation, religiously speaking, implies 
two parties to be reconciled, and two things to be 



THE LAW OF SACRIFICE. 97 

done. It implies on our part what is called ran- 
som, or propitiation, which is the price offered; 
and on the part of the Divine Law what is called 
pardon, or acceptance, which is the reward ob- 
tained. In the symbolic language of the New 
( Testament, Christ is said to pay the ransom for 
us with his blood, and to purchase by it the Divine 
pardon, which is then freely given to the be- 
liever. This we hold to be the language of pure 
symbol, not of literal fact; yet it stands for a 
very real fact in the life of the soul, and it is 
this fact, not any theorizing or dogmatizing about 
it, which we are trying to understand. Doctrine 
or symbol apart, then, what does that language 
mean ? 

That the sacrifice made by Christ in his accept- 
ance of the doom of death was in any literal way 
the purchase of our redemption, turns upon a no- 
tion of the sacrificial act which is so far away from 
our present notions that we can hardly see how it 
exists at all, or realize that it ever did exist. 
We cannot possibly think seriously, for example, 
of such a thing as seeking to buy any favour or ad- 
vantage to ourselves by cutting the throat of an 
innocent animal, a lamb or a kid; still less by 
knocking down a bull and bleeding him to death. 
But this was so familiar and must have seemed 
so reasonable once, that in " Hebrews " it is freely 
used to impress upon Christian disciples the moral 
value and religious meaning of a martyr death, 
like that of Jesus. With us it is just the other 
way. As a religious image, "the lamb that was 

7 



98 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

slain " does not impress us at all, till we think of 
the sinlessness and patience of the victim it rep- 
resents. " As a sheep before her shearers is dumb, 
so he opened not his mouth : " that is the proph- 
et's picture of the just man brought to the bar of 
his persecutors, and the symbol abides in the 
world's "heart of heart." So the girl princess 
standing at the altar in Aulis, her scarlet robe (in 
the vivid poetic diction of JEschylus) picturing 
the blood about to gush at the stroke of the high- 
priest's hand, made in her virgin innocence so 
pitiful a picture to the fancy of the Greek that 
later fancy, out of pure compassion to that plead- 
ing image, held that she was caught from the sa- 
crificial knife by the same offended deity that had 
demanded the offering, and was made, herself, a 
priestess at that deity's altar. It is the human 
aspect of the tragedy that comes home to us. We 
are quick to feel the moral quality, where we find 
only horror and disgust in the ritual act. That a 
brave man should meet death bravely when it 
comes in the line of duty ; that a pious man should 
meet it piously, with trust and resignation; that 
a patient man should endure patiently the agony of 
it when it comes in an agonizing form, — all this 
seems to us very natural and simple : very noble, 
also, as we see it on its purely human side. It 
is the highest form we know, of that great tragedy 
of human life, whose office (according to the old 
saying) is to purify the soul by those two profound 
emotions, awe and pity, — as we have seen of late 
years in three marked examples, each of which 



THE LAW OF SACRIFICE. 99 

enchained for months the sympathy of the civil- 
ized world. * 

And of sacrifice in this purely human sense the 
noblest form is self-sacrifice for an object wholly 
free from all taint of self-seeking: of which the 
death of Jesus is the accepted type. He is often 
said to lay down his life for us ; and once (John 
x. 18) he is said to do it of his own free choice. 
Now many martyrs have died of their own free 
choice; and many a Hindoo widow has burned 
herself on her husband's funeral pile of her own 
free choice. But to our thought that free choice 
hurts the moral value of the act, giving it some- 
thing of the reproach of suicide. And, if we look 
to the circumstances in the case of Jesus, we see 
that it was not like that. He surrendered him- 
self — full of abounding life as he was — to the 
certainty of death with great agony and conflict. 
This we see in the Garden of Gethsemane, and 
hear it in the bitter cry, "If it be possible, let 
this cup pass from me!" But, that crisis once 
past, he met the destiny before him with absolute 
patience and trust. It was like a soldier's fidel- 
ity, who will not turn back when wounds and death 
are in the way; and so he is called "the captain 
of our salvation. " It was like the obedience of a 
child, which takes its mother's hand and submits 
without shrinking to the painful necessary opera- 
tion of a cruel surgery; and so he is called God's 
" well-beloved Son. " The merit is not in the pang 

* The Emperor Frederick, and the Presidents Garfield and 
Grant. 



100 POSITIVE EELIGION. 

of suffering, but in the willing submission to a 
doom that is seen to be inevitable. 

And this willing submission appears — by some 
law that lies very deep in our spiritual nature — 
to be the essential condition of that state of mind 
implied in the words " pardon " and " reconcilia- 
tion. " Here, perhaps, it is just as well not to try 
to analyze the fact by any psychological process, 
but simply to look at it and see if we can what it 
means. We will take, then, a chapter of simple 
common experience, and listen to plain first-hand 
testimony about it. And the testimony I shall 
select is couched not in the language of every-day 
life, which might deceive us by its apparent shal- 
lowness, or else take a colouring too emotional for 
our present use ; but it shall be a passage which I 
copy from the record of a pious woman of five hun- 
dred years ago, in which the antique phrase may 
perhaps catch the eye, and serve to put the 
experience she speaks of in clearer relief : — 

It is God's will that we have three things in seeking of 
his gift. The first is that we seek wilfully and busily, 
without sloth, as it may be with his grace, gladly and 
merrily, without unreasonable heaviness and vain sorrow. 
The second, that we abide him steadfastly for his love, 
without grudging and striving against him, unto life's end 
— for it shall last but a while. The third is that we 
trust in him mightily, of full and true faith ; for it is his 
will that we know, that he shall appear suddenly and 
blessedfully [blissfully] to all his lovers. 

And this is a sovereign friendship of our courteous Lord, 
that he keepeth us so tenderly whiles we be in sin ; and 



THE LAW OF SACRIFICE. 101 

furthermore he toucheth us full privily, and sheweth us 
our sin by the sweet light of mercy and grace. But when 
we see our self so foul, then we ween that God were an- 
gry with us for our sins. Then we be stirred of the Holy 
Ghost by contrition into prayer and desire, amending of 
our self with all our might to slack the wrath of God, 
unto the time we find a rest in soul, and softness in con- 
science. And then hope we that God hath forgiven us 
our sin ; and it is true. And then sheweth our courteous 
Lord himself to the soul merrily, and of full glad cheer, 
with friendfully welcoming, as if it had been in pain and 
in prison, saying thus : My dear darling ! I am glad thou 
art come to me in all thy woe. I have ever been with thee ; 
and now seest thou me loving, and we be oned in bliss. 

If we had been trying to describe some such ex- 
perience as that, we should have dropped all this 
quaint dialect, and this charming old imagery — 
as if we were trying, very humbly, to do ser- 
vice to some very powerful and kind-hearted noble- 
man, who was too great a gentleman not to be 
polite to the very humblest of his servants. We 
should have spoken, perhaps, of some duty that 
had seemed to us very hard, till we took hold man- 
fully, and were all the happier for having done it. 
We should have spoken, perhaps, of some fault or 
misdeed that had made us very much ashamed, 
and of an effort to get the better of it — which 
very effort had given us great joy. We should 
have told, perhaps, of some sorrow or pain, sick- 
ness or loss, in which we had found real peace by 
throwing ourselves (so to speak) upon the bosom 
of the Eternal, much as a spent seaman trusts 



102 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

himself to the buoyancy of the wave, and so re- 
ceiving in a moment that which religionists speak 
of as the salvation that comes by faith. If we are 
really at once humble of heart and clear in under- 
standing, we shall not, I think, speak of it as if 
the Lord of all things were really thinking about 
us and pleading so with us. That is the language 
of the heart, not always to be translated into the 
dialect of the understanding. We set it down as 
imagery and symbol, in which all of us have at 
times to speak of religious things. The one main 
fact which we seem to have a glimpse of is this : 
that there is a deep sense of unworthiness, weak- 
ness, ignorance, shame ; and that the way of the 
meanest duty has been the way of deliverance 
from that gloom into a great light and joy. 

That duty was our act of sacrifice. That joy 
was the joy of our pardon and reconciliation. 
Somehow — we do not well know why — a certain 
sense of alienation, of disobedience, of unworthi- 
ness, is likely to come first, and to come with a 
very keen and deep sense of contrition, as the con- 
dition of the peace and joy that follow. This, we 
may perhaps say, is our way of sharing that sen- 
timent which claims no merits and no rights in 
presence of one's Sovereign. We are but unprofit- 
able servants; we have done only that which it 
was our duty to do. At least, the humility which 
that sentiment implies is the condition of the re- 
ward that follows. Possibly, we may not have 
felt it for ourselves. Perhaps we shall think we 
have not, even if we have. But, if we think of it 



THE LAW OF SACRIFICE. 103 

again, — longer, deeper, and alone, — we may 
find, after all, that we are not quite strangers to 
such experience. We, too, have had something 
like a sense of alienation, contrition, unworthi- 
ness, unrest. We, too, by that way have found 
again harmony and peace. The experience came 
and went. It is one of the subtlest, deepest, ob- 
scurest, in our religious psychology. But it is 
there. And it may stand as our key, our hint, 
our help, in understanding that fact which has 
been of such enormous moment in the spiritual 
evolution of humanity, and which we call the Law 
of Sacrifice. 



VII. 

A RELIGION OP FEAR. 

"The beginning of wisdom is Fear of the Eternal." 

T FEAR God, says Sir Thomas Browne, but I 
am not afraid of him. His words are: "I 
thank God, and with joy I mention it, I was never 
afraid of hell, nor never grew pale at the descrip- 
tion of that place. . . . That terrible term hath 
never detained me from sin, nor do I owe any 
good action to the name thereof. I fear God, yet 
am not afraid of him. " (Religio Medici, Part I. ) 
These are brave words to have been written, as 
they were, amidst the angry controversies of two 
hundred and forty years ago. And that, it seems 
to me, is exactly the attitude of a sound and manly 
mind toward the highest, deepest, greatest Power 
that our minds can conceive. The feeling has 
nothing to do, necessarily, with the distinctness 
with which we can think of the Almighty as a 
sovereign Judge, exercising judgment in his own 
person. That turns on an act of the imagination, 
or else on a point of philosophical speculation, 
which, the more we think of it, seems the more 
impossible to grasp. Simonides, as Cicero tells 
us, was once asked by Hiero of Syracuse — the 
man of high genius by the crafty statesman — to 



A RELIGION OF FEAR. 105 

give his opinion about the Divine Nature. He 
asked a day to consider of it ; then two days, then 
four, and so on, still doubling the time ; and at last 
gave it up as wholly beyond the power of the mind 
to fathom. That is, in brief, the story of all hu- 
man speculation about the nature and attributes 
of Infinite Force. It is not thought, but emotion, 
with which the human mind can contemplate the 
attributes of Deity. That emotion, at its highest, 
is a serene and unfaltering trust in infinite Good- 
ness. But, at its deepest, it must always be a 
profound awe, a religious fear. To think of the 
lightning flash and the thunder-storm, the cata- 
ract, the earthquake, and the tornado ; to think of 
the appalling speed with which this vast globe of 
earth is hurled along in its orbit, — twenty miles 
in a second, more than a hundred times as fast as 
the ball from a cannon; to think of the mere 
change of seasons, and that shifting wave of life 
that follows the sun's declination, now north, now 
south, with the amazing phenomena borne along 
upon it, — six months' flow and six months' ebb; 
to think of the wonder and terror, the passion and 
storm, that sweep across the narrow track of our 
own life on this terrestrial ball ; and then, having 
thought of these, to take one glance, awestruck, at 
the spangled depths of the sky, above us and 
around ; to remember that, in all this universe of 
wonder, glory, and dread, we have seen, as it 
were, but the fringes of the garment in which the 
Almighty wraps himself from our view, because 
(as the ancients thought) no mortal could behold 



106 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

that unutterable splendour and live, — to think of 
all this, I say, it does not appear as if " the fear of 
the Lord " were likely ever to cease, as the real 
basis of the emotion that lifts us toward the Eter- 
nal. Take what shape it may, enlightened and 
lifted up as you will aboye the old slavish terror, 
it remains " the beginning of wisdom " to us all. 

The scientific habit of the present day is to look 
back a good way to the origin of our emotions ; to 
trace the deyelopment of them through many stages 
of animal life ; and, for the sake of understanding 
better our morals and religion, to take our lessons 
from the naturalist. 

I was travelling once with a very intelligent ge- 
ologist, a man familiar with the philosophy of evo- 
lution; and he remarked upon this fact — that the 
ordinary condition of almost every animal, in a 
state of nature, is what he called a condition of 
flight When it is not seeking its own food, — that 
is, fighting outright starvation, — it is generally 
straining its faculties to escape some one of the 
powerful, fleet, cunning enemies that seek it for 
their prey. The instant it falters in its powers of 
flight, it is struck down. This is what naturalists 
call the " struggle for existence. " Sometimes we 
speak of it as the cruelty of Nature. And, in fact, 
it makes the ground of the argument by which 
some recent philosophers dispute a benevolent pur- 
pose in creation. But, if we only think of it a 
moment, it is rather the mercy and tenderness of 
Nature. "Not a sparrow falleth to the ground 
without your Father. " That is Nature's way — I 



A RELIGION OF FEAR. 107 

venture to say the only way we can possibly con- 
ceive, if animal life as we understand it is to ex- 
ist at all — of removing the lame, the bruised, the 
sickly, the old, from the crowded ranks of life, 
and so escaping the accumulation of helpless mis- 
ery, and keeping up the fresh vigour of animal ex- 
istence. In this range of being the race is to the 
swift and the battle to the strong. Any hesita- 
tion in the Lord of Nature, any weak compassion 
here, would multiply many times over the misery 
it seemed to check. The inexorable, the inevita- 
ble, the most merciful law is the universal strug- 
gle for existence and survival of the fittest. 

So far the naturalist. But the thing to be taken 
note of by the religious moralist is this : that the 
higher faculties of the creature — ■ its strength, its 
skill, its swiftness — owe their very creation to this 
race for life, which makes its existence one long 
"condition of flight." The miraculous darting 
speed of a fish in the water, the strange writhing 
of a snake in the grass, the easy poise and amazing 
convolutions of a swallow on the wing, the slender 
grace and swiftness of a deer or greyhound, the 
almost human sagacity of the elephant, — all these, 
if we stop to think of it, are not (in our modern 
view) gifts outright made by the Creator to his 
creatures. They are faculties slowly evolved in 
that long process, through countless generations. 
And of them all the strongest motive, or impel- 
ling force, is that haunting fear which makes 
the creature's life so largely a condition of flight. 

Take away that fear, and the incessant training 



108 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

of every higher faculty which it compels, and you 
have — what ? Fishes, such as swim lazily round 
in a glass tank; wild beasts, miserable, diseased, 
and discontent, as you see them in a menagerie; 
birds as you find them petted and pining in cages ; 
pampered dogs, with all the faults of spoilt chil- 
dren, and even less chance to mend, for lack of 
any deep spiritual ground of moral life in them. 
In short, without that wholesome element of 
terror, without that stimulating condition of 
flight, all the free, wild, picturesque life, all that 
keen, healthy faculty of enjoyment in the animal 
creation perishes ; and, out of mere inanition and 
atrophy of its higher powers, it begins inevitably 
to lapse back to the condition of those dull, stupid, 
lumpish creatures, that wallowed in the slime ages 
before man was born. 

Now it is just as true of a man as it is of any 
other creature, that his higher faculties always 
need the stimulus of a wholesome fear. To begin 
with, man's life is a battle with the elements. His 
natural enemies are storm, hunger, accident, ague, 
fever, frost. In such rude habitation as he can 
find or frame, he is in a state of siege from wild 
animals stronger, swifter, and fiercer than he, — 
the bear of the wood, the tiger of the jungle, the 
wolf of the plain, the snake in the grass, the dragon 
of the swamp, the vulture of the sky. Loo,k back 
on the beginnings of human life on earth ; and in- 
stead of the fair garden of Eden innocence as Mil- 
ton pictures it, watered and bounded by its four 
pleasant rivers, and with beasts that neither raven, 



A RELIGION OF FEAR. 109 

rage, nor howl, — a manifest allegory of the moral 
life of man, a mere late dream of Oriental poetry, 
— you find a condition so squalid, so pitiful, so 
gross, so beset with violences and fears, that only 
by a strong effort of imagination can we think of 
it as the state out of which our civilization, order, 
and intelligence have actually grown. 

It may be that the mental endowment of the ear- 
liest men, at least of the superior race from which 
we claim to be descended, was something higher 
than would seem on the surface. It is hard to im- 
agine, otherwise, how that wretched life, beset by 
so many enemies, could have continued at all, to 
serve as the basis of the immense advance that has 
been effected since. But the particular thing to be 
observed about it is this : that every step of that 
advance was made under the direct pressure and 
goad of some form of fear, — at least until pure 
intellect could get on its feet, and unfold itself in- 
dependently, as in abstract learning and pure sci- 
ence and fine art, by its own laws or to serve its 
own delights. 

Or take our condition now, with such vast ac- 
cumulations of wealth, power, and skill as we have 
inherited from the past. Are we yet delivered 
from the pressure of the motive of a similar fear ? 
I think not. What is our best engineering skill, 
but equipment for our conflict with the terrors of 
storm and flood and ocean wave ? What is all 
our medical science, but a life-battle with pain 
and pestilence and inborn dread of death ? Some- 
times the great dread will be sprung upon us all at 



110 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

once as it was thirty years ago) of losing at one 
stroke that unspeakable treasure and gain which 
we sum up in the ideal unity of the State; and 
suddenly we come to the consciousness of a new 
range of faculties and a new source of strength, — 
very much (to compare a great thing with a small) 
like what a young eagle must feel when a rattle- 
snake frightens him from his perch, and he trusts 
for the first time the power of his own wings in 
flight. 

But in quieter times, what is it we are honestly, 
healthily, usefully afraid of ? The poor, of more 
galling poverty. The poorest, of outright starva- 
tion. The richer, of losing what they have. The 
man in business, of loss or bankruptcy. Those 
of somewhat higher but insecure position, of the 
loss of caste, security, comfort, social standing. 
The energy and hope that make our limbs to walk 
and our wings to fly are set off over against that 
background; their bright is relieved against the 
shadow of that besetting fear. 

I put all this on a very low level. It is best to 
start so. And I say that this meaner fear is ne- 
cessary to the developing and sustaining of our 
higher faculties, — if not the highest, at least our 
working, executive faculties. The mere shelter, 
for a single generation, from what we call "the 
healthy stimulus of prospective want " generally, 
as we see, incapacitates a rich man's children, at 
any rate his grandchildren, from having skill or 
self-command or foresight enough so much as to 
keep the wealth he leaves them. The faculty, it 



A RELIGION OF FEAR. Ill 

would seem, can only grow, can only be main- 
tained, like forests on a hillside, by the actual 
beating of rainstorms and wrestling with the stress 
of wind. 

There is no time to follow out these forms of 
natural dread, nor is there need. We only wish 
to see how that motive of fear plays its part in 
the unfolding of the higher life. For " the terror 
of the Lord," in the old theological sense, has 
faded almost wholly away from the cultivated 
mind of our generation. That we cannot help. 
It is no fault of ours that it has come to be so; it 
is no use our trying to revive it. But it is a mat- 
ter of very great consequence what emotion, or what 
class of emotions, may come to occupy its place. 
A blank defiance of the moral laws of the universe 
— what goes in life by the name of practical athe- 
ism, or in politics by the name of anarchism — is 
very much worse, in its effect on character and hu- 
man welfare, than the fear which it derides as su- 
perstitious. And we are not much better off, when 
we find ourselves on the level of those mean and 
sordid fears which common life is apt to generate. 

The old religious terror has left to our inheriting 
a name which has not yet lost all its appalling 
significance. Let us think, one minute, of that 
name. 

" Hell [says Carlyle] generally signifies the Infinite 
Terror, the thing a man is infinitely afraid of, and shudders, 
and shrinks from, struggling with his whole soul to escape 
from it. There is a hell therefore [he goes on to say] 
which accompanies a man in all stages of his history and 



112 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

religious or other development ; but the hells of men and 
peoples differ notably. With Christians, it is the infinite 
terror of being found guilty before the just Judge. With 
old Romans it was the terror not of Pluto, for whom 
probably they cared little ; but of doing unworthily, doing 
un virtuously, which was their word for unmanfully. And 
now, what is it [he asks], if you pierce through his cants, 
his oft-repeated hearsays, what he calls his worships, and 
so forth, — what is it that the modern English soul does 
in truth dread infinitely, and contemplate with entire de- 
spair ? What is his hell — after all those reputable oft- 
repeated hearsays, — what is it ? With hesitation, with 
astonishment, I pronounce it to be the terror of not suc- 
ceeding ; of not making money, fame, or some other fig- 
ure in the world, — chiefly, of not making money. Is 
not that [he asks] a somewhat singular hell ? " 

"Better than none," we might reply. Better 
than none. It is very important indeed that there 
should be some fear, some terror at something, 
to push men on, to shore them up, so that they 
shall not lapse back into mere helpless indolence, 
indigence, idiotism, or despair. We think it a 
great matter when a young man, after his wild, 
idle, or sentimental years, distinctly conceives 
such an aim in life as to make a fortune, to distin- 
guish himself, to achieve an honest independence, 
spurred on by the healthy stimulus of prospective 
want. We think it a great matter when a reck- 
less spendthrift or drunkard distinctly conceives a 
motive even so low as a mere selfish prudence, — 
dread of beggary, perhaps, or of delirium tremens, 
— still more, if he conceives a motive so high as a 



A RELIGION OF FEAR. 113 

generous ambition, chat can lift him out of the 
slough and the ruts of a wasted life, and make 
him in some way a help to other men, at least to 
his own wife and children, and no longer a bur- 
den and drag upon them. By all means let us do 
justice to any motive that will keep men from wal- 
lowing in the slime of mere sensuality, or sliding 
into sheer recklessness and despair. After all, 
this modern hell, at which Carlyle flings his sharp 
sarcasm, is not so much worse than some of the 
ancient ones. 

But there is a fear, and there is a hope, that be- 
longs to a higher level of life than that. 

I was asked one day — it was by an elderly Or- 
thodox Quaker: What is the difference between 
your own and other views as to the doctrine of 
hell and future punishment ? I answered that 1 
thought the difference was like this. The Ortho- 
dox doctrine, as I understand it, is as if a magis- 
trate should sentence a criminal to imprisonment 
— -I might have added, with torture — it may be 
for a term of years or it may be to hopeless impris- 
onment for life : future punishment would be like 
the latter. The Universalist doctrine, as I under- 
stand it, — at least, as it was taught once, — is as 
if a criminal should be sentenced for a limited 
term, five, or ten, or twenty years, with the cer- 
tainty that he will be released at the end of the 
term, and the chance that by repentance and good 
behaviour he may have the time of it considera- 
bly shortened. The opinion we hold is simply 
and only this : that sin — that is, any evil thing 

8 



114 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

willingly harboured in the soul, is like a poison 
in the blood, which brings fever and suffering be- 
cause it is a poison, and not as a punishment for 
being poisoned; and there is no such thing as par- 
don except getting out the poison, and no such 
thing as salvation except restoring the health. 
This is the only doctrine about it which I profess, 
or have any pretension to understand. And in 
this view of it, it does not make the slightest dif- 
ference, as to the motive we appeal to, whether life 
is longer or shorter — whether it ends on earth or 
continues to all eternity: our business is to get 
rid of the poison. And that poison, or the tor- 
ment of it, is what we mean by hell. 

Now this poison — the poison of vileness and 
degradation of character, the poison of corruption 
and disorder in the body politic — is what I am 
very much afraid of. It is that particular " terror 
of the Lord " which, as I hold, can have a very 
real meaning to us, here and now. So far from 
fading out as men grow more thoughtful, more in- 
telligent, more moral, it appears to me that this 
real and wholesome fear must become more liv- 
ing, powerful, and keen. I have not the least hes- ' 
itation in saying that there is no other sense what- 
ever in which we have anything left of what may 
be called the terror of the Lord, or of any of the 
laws of his government, as they bear on the destiny 
of our soul. None — whatever. We can accept, 
if you please, all the imagery and symbolism that 
have depicted that terror to other minds and other 
times, — the Eternal Judge, the sheep and goats, 



A RELIGION OF FEAR. 115 

the lake of fire, the torments of devils. Let us 
try to understand what we can, not dispute upon 
what we can never know anything about. Look 
deep enough, look far enough: none of those im- 
ages are too vivid and intense to tell the simple 
fact. But that fact is not — what seems horrible 
blasphemy to say — that torments are wreaked out- 
right for vengeance upon a naked, shivering, help- 
less soul. It is that the soul is sick, and wants 
healing ; the soul is hungry, and needs to be fed ; 
the soul is blind, and wants restoring of its sight ; 
the soul is fevered with the poison in its veins, 
which needs to be eradicated ; the soul is well nigh 
dead, and must be brought to life again. 

This hospital imagery does well enough to hint 
the terror. But the reality of it is found, when 
we have seen for ourselves, as Shakespeare saw, 
the baffled thirst of selfish ambition; the insatia- 
ble jealousy and envy ; the dull stupidity ; the sharp 
malignity ; the impotent lust ; the gains that have 
no pleasure in them; the remorse of wasted op- 
portunity; the craving of passion that can never 
be content. When we have seen these things, we 
have seen a living soul in hell. The fires of that 
hell smoulder underneath many a smooth surface, 
and behind many a polished mask. That is the 
hell for us to fear ! " What shall it profit a man if 
he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul ? 
Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul ? 
Again I say : Be not afraid of them which kill the 
body and after that have no more that they can do. 
But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear. Fear 



116 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

Him " — not as we must understand it now, not the 
good God, but the spirit of evil, the enemy of God 
— which after he hath killed, — when courage is 
dead, when hope is dead, when all is gone that 
made life worth the living, — hath power to cast 
into the hell of black despair! Yea, I say unto 
you, fear Him! 



VIII. 
A RELIGION OP TRUST. 

" They also serve, who only stand and wait." 

rpHE discipline of life sometimes puzzles our 
understanding, quite as much as it baffles 
our will. For the time it makes us not stronger, 
but weaker ; not confident, but fearful : it does not 
lift us up, but humbles us under an overwhelming 
sense of failure and disappointment. We stood 
ready, but have to wait. We try, but break down 
helplessly. We form plans and hopes — only to 
be thwarted and renounced. We set our heart 
upon some task, which seems the one thing most 
needing to be done — only to find it slipping from 
our hands. We launch our little bark bravely; 
but it is cast all adrift by some stroke of the im- 
penetrable, mysterious, inexorable Power, that 
works its sovereign will with us. 

Now the lesson of practical duty is, commonly, 
very plain and simple; and its practice is not, 
commonly, very difficult. It is, to serve the daily 
service of our life in the station where we are; 
to take its situations as they come, for our op- 
portunity; or, at some critical moment, to act, 
to dare, to say the right word, to do the right 
thing, and so win the post where we can do some 
higher and harder thing that may be claimed of 



118 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

us afterwards. But there is another lesson, deeper 
and not so plain. It is the lesson of perfect resig- 
nation and trust, when the time comes to wait ; to 
suffer; to be defeated, misunderstood, or laid by 
as useless ; to linger in sickness or mortal pain ; 
to see the hopes of life crushed, its activities baf- 
fled, and its lines of service cut off. 

As life is laid out in its main courses for most 
of us, the time comes for both, and each comes 
naturally in its place. The discipline of life is a 
very different thing for a strong man in the flower 
of his years, and for the same man crippled by 
accident, smitten by disease, or bowed with the 
weight of age. The easier lesson is what we are 
to learn first, — to spend our strength in willing 
obedience, serving God's law and man's need with 
our best fidelity. As Milton, in the flush of his 
young hope, said at twenty-three : — 

" Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow, 
It shall be still in strictest measure even 

To that same lot, however mean or high, 

Towards which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven : 

All is, if I have grace to use it so, 

As ever in my great Task-master's eye." 

The other, harder lesson comes afterward, — that 
which he had learned by heart at length, in blind- 
ness, old age, loneliness, penury and pain : — 

" God doth not need 
Either man's work, or his own gifts. Who best 

Bear his mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state 
Is kingly : thousands at his bidding speed, 

And post o'er land and ocean without rest. 
They also serve, who only stand and wait. 



A RELIGION OF TRUST. 119 

We may have thought of this sometimes, when 
we have seen it in those we honoured and loved, 
who have grown old before us, or have fallen sick 
among us: how tenderly, how thoughtfully, how 
reverently we have been moved to feel towards 
them, seeing in their lives how well the first les- 
son of brave fidelity had been practised; how 
hardly and painfully that other lesson of patient 
trust had to be learned at last, through long wait- 
ing, pain, decrepitude, and tears! Not lightly — 
not lightly — but oh how wisely and kindly, when 
we learn at length to see it as we ought, does the 
Lord of our life lay on us the burden of his yoke, 
and comfort us by his rod and staff, and bid us 
come to Him — to Him — that we may find rest ! 

As one comes on to middle life, or past it, his 
thoughts might often take a turn like this: "I 
have been led all along," he might say, "by a 
Hand that I did not see, in a path I did not know. 
I seem to see, now, that it has been very little any 
choice of mine what post I should stand in, what 
work I should do, the sort of success I should find, 
or the sort of trial I should bear. I seem to have 
accepted these things, not chosen them. I should 
not have chosen so. I should have marked out be- 
forehand something very different. But I see that 
it is better for me now, than if I could have had 
my own way. And for what of it is left I will 
trust, as I might have trusted for what is past 
already. " 

So he might say to himself — and wisely. None 
of us can take the full measure of his powers be- 



120 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

forehand. None of us can guess what successes, 
losses, crosses, and gains will come to him ; what 
accidents he must encounter; how his own will 
must clash with the wills of other men. All these, 
which make so sharply marked and so large a fig- 
ure in the pattern of life as we look back on it, are 
out of sight; they are not to be seen, they are not 
to be guessed at, when we try to anticipate what 
that pattern will be. Do our very best to fore- 
cast and judge and determine, there is the wide 
margin, which is quite beyond our eye to see or 
our power to control. We may hoist the sail, and 
govern the helm, and study the laws of the ele- 
ments that bear us on. But, when we are once 
afloat, it is the infinite deep below and the infinite 
space around. The two oceans, of wave and wind, 
hold us between them in an embrace we cannot 
quit ; and our surrender to them, in the last resort, 
is as absolute, helpless, and complete, as that of 
the child, who is hushed by their rocking, or fright- 
ened by their roar and swell ! 

It is good for us, now and then, to fall back on 
this thought of our direct, personal relation to the 
Infinite Power that sustains our life. If any of us 
were asked, "What is the most important thing 
you can imagine or desire, for the well-being of 
the one person you hold dearest — the child of 
your love, the cherished companion of your life ? " 
— I think he could not fail to answer, in sub- 
stance, this : To he on right terms with that Infijiite 
Power. This one answer we may put in a variety 
of ways. It might mean health, success in life, a 



A RELIGION OF TRUST. 121 

congenial occupation, an honourable position, hap- 
piness in general. But take it only on its religious 
side. Some will put it doctrinally, and say it is 
the assurance of forgiveness, acceptance, salvation, 
on the terms God has been pleased to reveal in his 
holy Word; and they are right. Some will say, 
philosophically, that it is a conscious harmony with 
the all-enfolding Spirit, and the laws of universal 
Life, as we come to know them ; and they are right. 
Some will call it, morally, simple fidelity to Truth 
and Duty, as it comes clear to the heart and con- 
science ; and surely they are right. But all mean, 
at bottom, the same thing which may be still better 
said religiously, — that is, practically, in the sim- 
plest, plainest way. It is, the surrender and trust 
of the soul, childlike, to a Power which we are 
sure has a right to govern, and will not command 
for nought, — the surrender of perfect obedience, 
or else the surrender of perfect trust. 

Now I do not know whether your mind, whether 
my mind, whether any man's mind, is able to 
reconcile (as we call it) our philosophy and our 
faith, — the facts of our life with what we believe, 
or have been taught, of the universal wisdom and 
the Eternal love. I should rather think not. But 
this I know : that the space between them is bridged 
over, in the experience of a right-minded and true- 
hearted man. When he comes to the point where 
he must meet God's angel (as it were) face to face, 
in a narrow way, where neither can turn out, he 
must fling his theories away, and submit himself 
just like a little child. 



122 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

That is the way in which the Lord of our life 
chooses to receive us. I do not say that he picks 
out a subject here and there to exercise in this way, 
experimenting (as it were) with various and doubt- 
ful result upon the human heart and destiny. But 
only this: that, in the broad conditions of human 
life as we find them established here and now, 
there are certain great constant facts — among 
them joy, love, hope; and among them also dis- 
appointment, grief, care, and pain — which occur 
so often, and on so large a scale, that we cannot 
fail to trace in them some special service in the 
moral discipline of the soul. 

To speak here only of a single one. Have we 
ever felt that shrinking and awe which comes upon 
the heart, when it is upon the threshold of untried 
duties, or under the shadow of an impending sor- 
row ? Then let us try to see what was in part the 
Divine signification of it to us. It was, to put 
our mind in a position that makes such words as 
those before quoted natural and true words to us. 
They profess to tell us nothing of the utterly in- 
scrutable designs of God. They only speak the 
mood in which the mind accepts them. They tell 
the faith, without which the heart would break, 
or consume itself in its lonely agony. 

That faith may be an intelligent faith, when we 
have learned more of Him in whom we have be- 
lieved; when we know that "He is able to keep 
that which we have committed to him," for the 
day when such secrets will be revealed. But 
often, again, it will be a blind faith: blind, as 



A RELIGION OF TRUST. 123 

when my poor little bandaged and suffering child 
once put her hand in mine, and I led her blind- 
fold through the streets of a strange city. It is 
absolute, entire, unquestioning: it cannot stay to 
question : else it is only weakness and doubt. The 
soul by its own effort and prayer must win it, in 
the conflict with passion and infirmity, and the 
struggle against despair. 

" They that are sick " need a physician, not just 
now a physiologist. When the act of surrender 
has come, when the soul's health is in some degree 
restored, then it will be time to set about the task 
of interpretation. Just now, everything is staked 
on the previous process of reconciliation. And 
for this we need, as the first condition, a submis- 
sion as absolute, as complete, as when one with a 
bruised and broken frame puts himself in the sur- 
geon's hands, and then resigns himself to sleep, that 
Nature's healing process may go on unhindered. 

As for the ills of life we meet, I am the last to 
counsel any bare, unintelligent submission to them. 
I say, Bear them like a man if you must ; while I 
also say, Contend against them like a man while 
you can. Study them, intelligently as you may, 
to see how you may shield yourself or others from 
them. 

But the time may come — it may come any day 
to me ; I know it has come to some of you — when 
these are all vain, untimely, and barren words. 
And, by the laws of the soul's constitution, by the 
lessons of all human experience, I know that the 
only wisdom then is trust. Faith is then just 



124 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

what the Scripture says it is : " the substance of 
things hoped for, and the evidence of things not 
seen," — the only evidence they can have as yet. 
It is the very beginning of the higher life in 
us. It is the first step, implied in all that follows. 
It is that without which any religion at all, any 
comfort, any peace, would be impossible. 

And finally, what does that faith declare ? Sim- 
ply this, that the soul is safe at last, in a life whose 
law is truth and whose end is peace. 

Do I mean by this that God's dealings are al- 
ways gentle with us ? that his yoke is always easy 
and his burden light ? No : it is not by indul- 
gence and ease that He rewards his faithful ones. 
The reward he promises is to give them a larger 
measure of fidelity ; ability to do more and suffer 
harder things; more spiritual strength and light. 
The very triumph of faith is often in the despair 
and abandonment of all that had made the earthly 
joy of life. 

If in the painful parts of our experience we 
should ever question how the wisdom or justice 
or love of God is seen in human life, then let the 
answer be already familiar to us, and learnt by 
heart beforehand — that difficulty and not ease, toil 
and not rest, suffering and not relief is the portion 
he assigns often to those nearest his own heart, 
because so the deeper law of the spirit of life in 
them is made manifest. It is a higher and nobler 
thing to obey a summons to peril and pain and 
toil, than one which promises ease, security, and 
delight. These are the blessings we instinctively 



A RELTGION OF TRUST. 125 

crave — for ourselves, perhaps ; at any rate for 
those we love best. But God does not so judge 
for us. Often, indeed, "he giveth his beloved 
sleep," which is forgetfulness of care and pain; 
and he gives it to them all at last. But oftener, 
again, he giveth hardship, that the soul may ripen 
its better strength ; grief and loss, that it may be 
driven to throw itself utterly into his arms, and 
so learn to bear the . consecrated cross. " Sol- 
diers ! " said a patriot captain to his little com- 
pany of banished men, " in recompense of the love 
you bear your country, I offer you hunger, thirst, 
cold, wounds, and death. Who accepts the terms ? 
let him follow me ! " The enthusiastic legion, we 
are told, followed him to a man. That is the 
temper, I think, which the Lord of our life likes 
to see in those whom he summons to his service ! 



IX. 

THE TERM "AGNOSTIC." 

" High as heaven : what canst thou do ? deeper than hell: what 
canst thou know?" 

rPHE distinctive thing in the Agnostic position, 
we have been told, is that it "surrenders 
the possibility of an intellectual solution of the 
problem of the universe. " To me it v^ould appear 
more correct to say that it fails to find in the hu- 
man mind, under present conditions, the capacity 
for an adequate solution of that problem. There 
are solutions in plenty, but all that we are ac- 
quainted with turn out, on further acquaintance, to 
be tentative and provisional. Take the Multiplica- 
tion Table, for instance, which is as good as any 
so far as it goes. It is, as Professor Whitney well 
remarked of it, "rich in facts," announcing one 
hundred and forty-four distinct, unimpeachable 
"objective relations,'' true of every class of ob- 
jects that can possibly be imagined. The philos- 
opher Pythagoras (if it was he who invented it) 
is said to have held Number as a key to the en- 
tire system of things. But from the multiplica- 
tion table the distance is not half so far to the 
Meeanique Celeste and the theory of Evolution 
as from these to the infinite complexity of the 
universe itself. 



THE TERM " AGNOSTIC." 127 

Now no problem can be adequately solved by 
the " method of science " until its data are known, 
which in this case means all the facts of the 
universe, — at least, all genera, or distinguish- 
able groups of facts ; and no one will pretend that 
these are all known and classified as yet. For one 
thing, that whole " night-side " of nature, which 
to the common mind makes by far the more im- 
portant hemisphere of our thought, — and .rightly, 
so long as there is such a thing as death, and a fu- 
ture life is thought of as possible, — cannot be even 
distantly approached by any scientific method we 
are acquainted with: except for a special revela- 
tion, it remains to us a blank mystery, to be met 
only by " an act of faith. " So that it cannot pos- 
sibly be meant that the problem of the universe has 
yet been solved. And when the contention has 
been narrowed down to this, — when the philoso- 
pher asserts that the thing can be done, and the 
man of science replies that he hopes so, but it has 
not been done yet, — we may fairly say that the line 
of difference is too fine to be seen by the naked 
eye. 

But a question of much greater interest to us is 
raised by this discussion; namely, whether a cor- 
rect and adequate "intellectual solution of the 
problem of the universe " is essential to sound 
ethical convictions or the permanency of the relig- 
ious life. It would be a pity to take up such a 
position as that just yet, when we must be some 
centuries distant from the " adequate " solution it 
demands : the feeling of weariness and impatience, 



128 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

in things of the Spirit, is quite strong enough al- 
ready. We have, it is true, abundance of formu- 
las, serviceable for present use ; but a formula is 
not a solution: it needs to be interpreted to the 
understanding, as much as the facts themselves 
which it professes to interpret. A very good for- 
mula is this of Mr. Abbot's : that we may conceive 
the universe under a threefold type, — as a Ma- 
chine, whose law is use ; as an Organism, whose 
law is life ; and as a Person, whose law is holiness. 
Seen under this threefold type, he says, the uni- 
verse is God. This new Trinity of his may be al- 
lowed to have some advantages over the old Chris- 
tian symbol. But it certainly needs explaining, 
quite as much as that, and is likely to invite quite 
as much misunderstanding and dispute. For we 
know nothing whatever of a " machine, " except as 
constructed by the skill of some fabricator to pro- 
duce a result external to itself ; and nothing of an 
"organism," except as shaped and modified by 
some environment, which it reacts upon till its 
vital force is spent, when it perishes and is ab- 
sorbed back in that; and nothing of a " person, " 
except as holding moral relations with other per- 
sons, and acting freely upon the realm of things 
in which it lives and moves. So that the critic 
will be apt to say that our symbol is not a happy 
one. If we must have a formula for these tran- 
scendental matters, we might even prefer that sim- 
plest of all, in the words of Scripture, that " God 
is Breath " {irvevfia 6 0e6s), which binds us to no 
predicates at all. 



THE TERM "AGNOSTIC." 129 

We have, again, in the religious world, those 
three types of Christian thought, the Catholic, the 
Calvinist, and the Transcendental. Each has been 
helpful in its way to the life of piety ; each, it 
may be, fails to satisfy us now. What then ? 
must we pause in our devotions till Science has 
completed its vast and intricate formula ? Surely, 
it were better to do as the men of Athens, whom 
Saint Paul beheld in their devotions grouped about 
the altar of an Unknown God, and commended 
them for it, as the Revisers have explained. Not 
(he adds) that God has left himself quite without 
witness; for, without troubling himself in the 
least about solving the problem of the universe, a 
common man can see enough by natural vision, 
when his eyes are once open, to stir his imagina- 
tion, his reverence, his gratitude, and his awe, — 
that is, the whole group of the emotions which 
make the breath of the religious life. 

So far, indeed, from the religious life being 
staked upon the adequacy of any such intellectual 
solution, it might be enough to say that all known 
religions have rested, frankly, on the bosom of 
the mysterious and unknown, — " mysteries which 
heaven will not have earth to know;" and that, 
even where religion allies itself by preference with 
the scientific rather than the speculative habit of 
thought, it still appeals not so much to science as 
to the mystery that lies beyond the horizon of sci- 
ence. The term " Agnostic, " in short, has come to 
be frankly accepted to define a certain form of 
religious mysticism as well as of irreligious scep- 

9 



130 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

ticism; and it seems worth while to consider it 
also in this new meaning. 

There are evidently three distinct sources of 
man's deepest religious conviction or belief, and 
not one merely, — the purely speculative, the logi- 
cal or scientific, and that which we may call the way 
of experience. There are those whom each one 
of the three fails to satisfy; while either one, if 
accepted in good faith, seems to him who accepts 
it to be valid and sufficient, perhaps the only valid 
and sufficient foundation of the religious life. And, 
speaking strictly, the term " Agnostic " ought to ap- 
ply, religiously, only to one who by some process of 
reason finds them all alike unsatisfying and unreal. 
To such a one all the phenomena of the religious 
life, whether in soul-experience or in great tides of 
passion that alter the course of human history, 
must seem alike abnormal, mere unintelligible ab- 
errations from the orbit of sanity and reason ; while, 
in the present view, religion might apparently be 
as genuine and vital a thing to the imagination, 
emotion, and conscience, even if speculation and 
logic were to fail utterly. In fact (to judge from 
our own experience), some such view as this ought 
to be taken, in the present condition of general 
thought about such things, unless we should do 
gross injustice to many a sincere seeker and sharer 
in the religious life, and even to human nature 
itself. 

The word itself, we are told, was first thrown 
out by Professor Huxley in conversation, in the 
year 1864, so that it has had an existence of just 



THE TERM " AGNOSTIC." 131 

over a quarter of a century. It was meant, we are 
reminded, not as a challenge of hostility, but as a 
term of courteous neutrality among thinking peo- 
ple. Its quick adoption and wide currency since 
show that the term was a needed one, and it is not 
likely soon to be disused. But we notice two 
things in the use of it, since it has become popu- 
larized, which appear to be worth attending to. 

The first is a disposition to depart from the tem- 
per of passionless neutrality which it was meant to 
convey, and to make it a name of enmity or con- 
tempt. The term " Agnostic " comes in popular use 
to be a sort of nickname, a bit of theological slang, 
doing service very much as the more uncivil words 
"sceptic," "unbeliever," "infidel," in rising grade 
of animosity, did half a century ago. Naturally, 
this tendency has been encouraged by those theo- 
logians whose ardour was stronger than their ar- 
gument, to throw obloquy upon a troublesome 
opponent. Some of them have even complained 
that it was not pungent enough : the self-called ag- 
nostic has been coolly invited, for honesty's sake, to 
accept those good old words " atheist " and " infi- 
del. " Why not go one step further, asks Mr. Hux- 
ley, and say " miscreant " at once, this being the 
same thing, etymologically, as " infidel " ? Words 
of theologic import are dangerous weapons of de- 
bate. They begin, innocently enough, by putting a 
mark on some merely intellectual distinction, but 
they soon become a badge of moral antipathy. We, 
certainly, who have suffered great injustice, as 
we think, from the animosities of sectarian war- 



132 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

fare, ought scrupulously to guard our lips from 
polemic nicknames and party slang. 

Further, not only the religionist confounds (as 
we might expect) suspense of judgment with re- 
jection of the truth; but the philosopher (who is 
apt to be as sharp a dogmatist as anybody) insists 
that this attitude of mind means denial of first 
principles, of objective reality, of the possibility 
of intellectual hold upon anything: it is, he says, 
the same thing with universal scepticism. This 
charge surprises me, — first, because the metaphy- 
sician, who has studied the laws of thought, ought 
to know what is meant by suspense of belief where 
evidence seems lacking, and ought to be particu- 
larly scrupulous about using any terms with a 
supposed theological imputation; and, secondly, 
because the scientific Agnostic is apt to be quite 
as firm and positive in his own field as any of his 
critics : it would be absurd to say that Mr. Huxley 
is not as convinced a " realist " in his biology as 
the most absolute of Hegelians in his constructive 
metaphysics. When he dissects a beetle, for ex- 
ample, he surely is, to his own thought, just as 
distinctly looking at " the thing itself " as any phi- 
losopher could possibly explain to him. In short, 
what we have learned to call " agnosticism " is the 
very thing which thirty years ago, with equal con- 
tumely, was reviled as "positivism" — by none, 
if we remember rightly, with more vivacity than 
by Mr. Huxley himself, when he attacked certain 
inferences from it in the line of religious practice. 

We notice, again, that in its proper sense the 



133 

term applies not to knowledge or opinion in gen- 
eral, but to particular lines of opinion, or assumed 
knowledge. We know very well what is meant 
when it is said that certain facts or beliefs are 
" verifiable : " they can be proved, to anybody, by 
observation, by experiment, by accomplished pre- 
diction, or by first-hand evidence. The whole 
business of scientific proof is to bring the fact, or 
the belief, within one of these four classes; and 
that is "verifiable" which may, supposably, be so 
reduced: thus the condition of Central Australia 
is unknown, but not " unknowable ; " what is on 
the other side of the moon — so that we cannot im- 
agine it to be made known to us, and if anybody 
should say there are trees or houses there, he could 
neither prove nor we disprove it — is supposably 
"knowable " in its own nature, though not in fact; 
while such matters as are implied in the problems 
of ultimate Being, we cannot so much as imagine 
to be brought within the circle of our knowledge, 
using that term in any legitimate or proper sense. 

Now most subjects of religious controversy are 
what has been, is now, or will be hereafter, going 
on behind a veil absolutely impenetrable to hu- 
man eye, — such as the origin of the world, the 
Divine decrees, the future destiny of man, the 
rank and nature of the celestial hierarchy. In 
deed, the very meaning and claim of a revelation 
is that it is a lifting, or pushing aside of that veil 
by some superhuman hand, so that certain privi- 
leged persons can actually see and know what is 
beyond it, and then declare it to others, — appre- 



134 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

hension of these facts being assumed as the most 
indispensable of all for man's true life and welfare, 
but not " verifiable " in any scientific sense. * They 
are the objects not of knowledge, but of faith. 

Nay, we need not go back to those unknowable 
and transcendent matters which were supposed to 
have been settled at Nicasa, at Chalcedon, at Dort, 
or at Westminster, — problems of the Eternal Son, 
the Eternal Decree, the Eternal Destiny of Man. 
We have in our own day a large body of proposi- 
tions just as positively asserted or denied, making 
fragments of what in the strictest sense is as purely 
a gnostic creed, just as incapable of any conceiva- 
ble process of verification. It is in view of these 
we observe that Professor Huxley, instead of an- 
nouncing a general scepticism, draws up a list of 
specific assertions that have been flung at him in 
the way of argument, so that we may know just 
what it is he defines his agnosticism by. 

We need not be at the pains to rehearse his list, 
which is made up of the assumptions of his indi- 
vidual antagonists, — whose name is Legion, for 
they are many. But we may draw up a little sum- 
mary of our own, which will help show how natu- 
ral and how obstinate is the habit of mind to deal 
with matters that lie out of the range of any con- 
ceivable knowledge or proof, — especially in the 
realm of religious thought, which by its very na- 
ture ever strains beyond the visible horizon. Take 
the whole Andover controversy, for example, on 
such a question as this: Is there or is there not a 
* See, above, the paper " What is a Revelation ? " 



THE TERM " AGNOSTIC." 135 

" future probation " for those who have not known 
Christ in the present life ? Or such a statement 
as this, from the Congregational "creed of 1883 :" 
that, since his resurrection and ascension, Christ 
"carries forward his work of saving men, and 
sends the Holy Spirit to convict them of sin and 
to lead them to repentance and faith, " — a tender 
and beautiful heart-belief, doubtless, but surely 
the last thing to offer as a challenge to the critical 
intelligence. Or that elaborated scheme of con- 
flict between God and Lucifer set forth many years 
ago by Charles Beecher, a man of true religious gen- 
ius, in his " Redeemer and Redeemed, " as to which 
he says that his mind "has worked and struggled 
and agonized day and night for twenty years," and 
remarks, incidentally, that " it is of great impor- 
tance to obtain a full knowledge of the original heav- 
enly efnpire, " — exactly as some men now insist on 
the need of a full "intellectual solution of the 
problem of the universe." In short, all the open 
questions of dogmatic theology belong to that or- 
der of " transcendentalism " which, as Professor 
Caird tells us, "all the great metaphysicians of 
modern times agree in rejecting. " * 

The peril of this kind of assumption is nearer 
than some of us are apt to think. In 1844 one of 
our own preachers argued to his own satisfaction 
that the explosion on board the "Princeton," by 
which Secretary Upshur was killed, was ordered 
by Divine Providence so as to prevent the an- 
nexation of Texas, which the Secretary was then 

* The Social Philosophy and Religion of Comte, p. 64. 



136 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

plotting : surely, an awkward and bloody way of de- 
ferring the political crisis for only a single year ! 
How many of us may have had an experience like 
that of Schleiermacher, who was implored with 
agony and tears, by the widow of a young friend, 
to say categorically that that friend still lived and 
loved in the world of Spirit, — Ms very self, — 
which she scarcely found in his assurance of that 
Life in God, which to his ardent faith was the 
most real of all existences ! We have nothing to 
do with the truth or error of any of these proposi- 
tions : it is even a fair question whether the grand 
enthusiasms of religious history would have been 
ever possible but for the audacity that so affronts 
and defies the bounds of reason. Intelligo quia 
credo ! The " peril " that lurks in them is the 
peril of staking our religious conviction, or any 
part of it, on assertions impossible to prove, or on 
ground which to the human mind must remain for- 
ever "unknowable," or on the attempted solution 
of " problems " which sober reason shows to be 
" unsolvable. " 

I do not see why anybody should be afraid or 
angry at these words, awkward and ugly com- 
pounds that they are, when they simply point out 
with convenient precision where lie the boundaries 
of verifiable fact. Science is held rigidly within 
those boundaries. Religion is not; but by its two 
great wings of imagination and adoration it con- 
tinually soars in a realm beyond them. It is the 
capacity for that, which keeps us from sitting con- 
tent in a fixed and orderly scheme of knowledge, 



137 

however intricate and expanded, and makes us 
anyway capable of the intellectual life of faith. 
"The light we have gained," says Milton, "was 
given us not to be ever staring on, but by it to dis- 
cover onward things more remote from our knowl- 
edge. " The religious life always assumes the glad 
possibility of realms beyond our sight, and (so far 
as we at present know) incapable of being scien- 
tifically proved. At the same time there are things 
of more importance yet in the life that now is, 
which can be proved, "still closing up truth to 
truth, ever as we find it ; " and these, to keep our 
mental sanity and firm footing for our thought, 
must always be sought in that rich, unsounded, 
unmeasured, unexhausted, and inexhaustible realm 
of men's actual experience of the religious life. 



X. 

THE NAME "GOD." 

"By my name ' The Eternal' was I not known." 

A EECENT journal of advanced liberalism, in 
commenting on a volume of religious dis- 
courses, offers with a preface of much seeming con- 
viction the following suggestion : — 

For the expression of the thought to be conveyed, some 
other word than the word " God " would be much more 
properly used in these, and all other discourses, by the 
liberal speakers and writers who now, simply for conven- 
ience or for convention's sake, make use of the term in 
question. For the " God " here is not the God which men 
in general know by that name. The " God " here yearned 
after and sought and found and rejoiced in is a something 
far higher and nobler, and more to be desired than the 
ordinary religious man would suspect, or could possibly 
hope for, from what he could by any means have in mind 
as "God." The Majestic Presence of the universe, as 
revealed in latter-day scientific vision, is too high and fair 
and helpful and meaningful to be labelled any longer with 
the label of ignorant, superstitious years ! With the label 
goes all the burden of the word's dark, century-laden con- 
notations. For us who know what those connotations are 
(and they are burned ineradicably into the popular mind 
as well as into the minds of scholars) the higher in the 
word cannot overbalance the lower. 



THE NAME "GOD." 139 

It is likely that this suggestion will seem to many 
persons merely offensive — possibly impious, and 
even blasphemous : certainly it would not have been 
a proposition safe to make a century or two ago. 
But it is best to give the maker of it credit for no 
evil intention; rather to take it in good faith, to 
see where the plausibility of it lies, if it has 
any, and what sober reasons there may be for or 
against it. 

I have said " for or against. " For, whatever our 
own use of terms, we cannot fail to see that the 
name " God" has continually been taken in vain, 
by more than one class of persons, so as to mean 
something which all of us repudiate with all our 
hearts. Not only have we the Pagan 

" Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust, 
Whose attributes were rage, revenge, and lust," — 

but in many a Christian confession of faith the 
name has been used to designate a Sovereign capa- 
ble of whatever wrath, partiality, vindictiveness, 
and vengeance we ascribe to the worst of Oriental 
despots ; One who claims all reverence and hom- 
age for the holiest of attributes, but puts his own 
favour arbitrarily at the price of such homage; 
One who inflicts torment unspeakable, just as arbi- 
trarily, with a relentlessness that such despots 
can only emulate afar off. That implacable Sov- 
ereignty we shudder to designate by the name 
"God." 

Again, in a large part of modern speculative phi- 
losophy the name " God" is used to give a certain 



140 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

sanction to what are in truth mere metaphysical 
abstractions: as when Spinoza says that "there 
cannot be, and we cannot conceive, any other Sub- 
stance than God ; " or when by craft of speech an 
" Absolute " without any attributes whatever is 
smuggled in, to occupy the title and throne of 
Deity. These modern substitutes had doubtless 
better go by their proper names, and not usurp a 
religious one. 

And so, too, with the "cosmic theism," which 
is merely a synthesis of all forces, known and un- 
known, in the hypothesis of one Universal Force. 
To cite words I have before used in a different 
connection : — 

To say that God is the source of all life, all force, is 
perfectly satisfying as a postulate of speculative theology. 
But when it conies to mean (as it must mean) not only 
that the germinating life and the law of social evolution 
are acts of God, but just as much the explosive force of 
dynamite and the ferocity that would use it to wreck the 
social fabric ; the hideous disease alike with the healing 
skill that fights it ; the crime and the criminal on exactly 
equal terms with the heroism and the saint, — then we 
find how worthless for any religious uses is that fine- 
sounding definition, after all. The term "God" in this 
sense has only one advantage, that I can see, over " The 
Absolute " or " The Unknowable " or " Persistent En- 
ergy " or " Stream of Tendency," — that it is shorter, and 
easier to speak or spell. 

We certainly shall not object to any new ideal of 
human speech, that it repudiates the name in any 
such sense as that. 



141 

Then again there is the gospel of passion, so 
dominant in modern poetry and fiction, which 
(knowing nothing holier than itself) easily decks 
itself with the holy name: as when Faust says, 
" Call it Chance, Heart, Love, God ! " — these be- 
ing all words on a like low level of mere emotion. 
The divinity of human sentiment is here poetically 
set forth in words that have become classic, whose 
passionate eloquence is sometimes cited as if they 
held a valuable religious truth. But, when we look 
for those words where they belong, we are struck 
rather by a certain dramatic significance which 
Goethe, it is likely, intended to convey in them: 
namely, that the speaker utters them with the phial 
of deadly anodyne in his pocket, which is presently 
to be administered to Margaret's mother, so as to 
put the poor child more completely in his power. 
That is the parable of pietistic sentiment divorced 
from righteousness, — as it is in the phase of mod- 
ern literature here referred to. 

Of recent poets, Browning is the one who often- 
est of all delights to introduce the name " God, " 
sometimes with a sharp sense of irrelevancy and 
a painful shock. And in his writings, with their 
astonishing dramatic energy, it has been said by 
an admiring critic* that the gospel of passion — 
that is, as distinct from the reason which discerns 
a higher law, or the conscience which constrains 
us to obey it — makes his real poetic creed. Just 
how that great genius, of such rare insight into the 
subtilties of men's hearts, may accept that creed 
* Professor Boyesen, in the " Independent." 



142 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

as a rule of conduct, it would not be fair to infer ; 
but so shining an example may at least put us in 
mind of others, whose name in modern literature 
is Legion (both for their number and their attri- 
butes), who have not only crowned Passion lord 
and king, but have kindled in his devotees some- 
thing very like a religious glow. We are glad of 
the freshness of any new ideal that will help keep 
that sort of apotheosis in check. 

This is to say, in other words, that neither ma- 
terial vastness and splendour as we find them in 
the visible universe, nor largeness of speculative 
view, nor emotional intensity on the passionate 
side of life, can justify the bringing in of the name 
" God, " denuded of the one particular attribute of 
moral holiness. Here we have nothing to do with 
any question of metaphysical theology : we reckon 
only with the plain facts of human life. Language 
is but an outgrowth of that life — as Max Miiller 
reminds us — by a process of development as 
strictly scientific and inevitable as that of any ani- 
mal or plant growth. Except by deliberate sup- 
pression of the order of experience it stands for, 
we only fumble and bungle when we refuse to em- 
ploy the language we inherit from the past. Now 
our religious phraseology has come down to us 
from the wisest, the most thoughtful, the most 
reverent and aspiring, of all past time. These are 
agreed in expressing by the name " God" their con- 
ception alike of the highest Moral Ideal and of 
the Universal Life — running the two together 
in the " daring faith " that, when we come to the 



THE NAME " GOD." 143 

heart of things, the highest and the holiest are 
one. 

The name, doubtless, not only reflects the mood 
of adoration it sprang from, but also signifies a 
personal Object of adoration, — personal, that is, in 
the only sense that can apply to existence, of which 
imagination itself can conceive no bounds. The 
term " person " we use, of course, purely as a sym- 
bol, not a definition, — a symbol we cannot discard 
at pleasure. Who are we — babes and sucklings, 
borne upon the bosom of great Humanity, mother 
of us all — that we should disown our mother- 
tongue which she has taught us, to substitute some 
philosophic phrase of our own inventing ? We are 
not bound, just at present, to accept any of the 
"connotations," the collateral ideas, which help 
fill out that symbol of the Unknown ; to admit all 
or any of those " attributes " which a forensic di- 
vinity has logically deduced from its postulates of 
universal Being. We have only, for the present, 
to say that there comes into the heart, now and 
then, a conception mingled at once of thought, 
emotion, and moral glow; and that, when this is 
once known and felt, the homage of the soul finds 
in it the testimony of a mysterious Presence, which 
it has learned to speak or think of only under that 
name " God. " Without that conception, without 
the capacity it implies, the mind is starved and 
poor. 

So far, I have in mind only the protest of a 
particular intellectual mood, which no way com- 
mits itself to any speculative opinion about the Ob- 



144 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

ject that has called it forth. Dr. Samuel Clarke, 
as Voltaire appears to have been strongly impressed 
by noticing, " never spoke the name of the Deity 
without a certain manner and tone of awe ; " but 
it is not likely that he felt this awe towards 
the result of his own philosophical deduction of 
" the being and attributes " of Him whom he al- 
ready worshipped in his heart as one "that pass- 
eth understanding." It is that very emotion of 
awe itself, that makes a clearer testimony. When 
Hamlet, in the extreme moment of mental agony, 

says — 

" O God ! 
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable 
Seem to me all the uses of this world ! " 

he is not uttering a personal appeal, or hinting at 
any personal faith: it is simply a testimony to the 
pregnant fact, that by a certain instinct, which we 
do not explain, the profoundest emotion clothes 
itself spontaneously in language reserved and con- 
secrated for its religious uses. Where this emo- 
tion is lacking, there is a certain shrinking and 
dislike, in minds of a serious cast, to employing 
such language at all. Thus Saint Paul says, in the 
simplest phrase of avoidance, " let it not be " (/xtj 
yevocTo) ; and I have heard grave objection made, 
by a highly cultivated man, to the levity with 
which the translators have rendered it into the 
colloquial English, " God forbid. " Such phrases 
have, to the great displeasure of that class of 
minds, too much in past time invaded our famil- 
iar speech : thus it gives us an unpleasant surprise 



THE NAME " GOD." 145 

in the correspondence of Charles Darwin, to find 
that when he had (as he said) quite outgrown the 
very capacity of the emotion they imply, he con- 
tinued to express it in the conventional phrases of 
every-day friendship.* It may be, indeed, that 
our less positive and more halting faith makes us 
more sensitive on these points; for certainly it 
would be a shock to us to hear what once came so 
naturally to the lips of a devout believer, " God 
bless me ! " to express a mild surprise, with as 
unembarrassed a tone as, "I beg your pardon." 
Samuel Joseph May was once asked, quite inno- 
cently, by a member of his conversation-class, 
whether there would be anything amiss in calling 
Electricity by the name " God ! " I do not know 
what his answer was ; but most of us, whatever of 
mystery and awe we feel towards that swift, unseen, 
subtle, and seemingly almighty agent, cannot pos- 
sibly liken it to reverence for Him whose mere 
messenger it is. 

We imagine a vain thing, again, when we seek 
to exalt our notion of Deity by dwelling on its 
assumed physical and material attributes. Or, if 
we say, as a sort of pious axiom, that God is all, 
and there is nothing else besides, we find a moni- 
tion of our peril in Christian history, which tells 
us how, from the most sweetly pious and humble- 
minded mystics of the Middle Age, "in secret 
places, and by underground channels, the panthe- 
ist idea spread unseen — pantheism which now was 

* As in the French conversational mon Dieu and pardieu, 
which are not at all profane, as they would be in English. 

10 



146 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

no longer vague and veiled : We do not believe in 
God, and we do not love him, and ive do not adore 
him, and ive do not hope in him; for this ivould be 
to avow that He is other than ourselves. Thus speak 
these heretics of the fourteenth century. So far 
have they pushed the phrase, God is all that ex- 
ists." For again we read, concerning the mysti- 
cal pantheism which asserts that " God is all and 
matter nothing, " that it " is capable of two inter- 
pretations. ... It may mean the life of the mind 
and soul carried always to the highest possible 
pitch; or it may be, and too often is, the excuse 
of the basest sensualism. Since, neither for sin 
nor for sanctity, the body can affect the soul, since 
sensuous pleasures are quite independent of the 
spiritual existence, the lower pantheism may ex- 
cuse debauch as a permissible relaxation not af- 
fecting the spirit. And this is what it generally 
does come to mean among communities of undis- 
ciplined and ill-educated enthusiasts." * 

There are a great many things, then, in which our 
common sense of fitness entirely accords with the 
suggestion, which at first sight seemed such a 
startling one, that the name " God " should be dis- 
used in our ordinary vocabulary. But there are 
quite as many other things, in which that disuse is 
forbidden by all that is best in us. So far in my 
argument, I have kept strictly within the limits 
of the thought and experience itself, and the felt 
proprieties of speech; I have not concerned my- 

* "The End of the Middle Ages," by A. Mary F. Robinson, 
pp. 37, 25. 



147 

self about the objective reality of that to which 
our emotions or thoughts refer. Further, it is 
not within my purpose to enter upon what we may 
call the field of forensic divinity, — to prove, or to 
illustrate by argument, what we really mean when 
we use that name ; what are, in the actual realm 
of Being, the attributes, or the conceptions, with 
which we must clothe it ; what the words wisdom, 
might, tenderness, justice, even personality, must 
mean when by the terms of our argument we apply 
them to the Infinite. Our fathers were fond of 
defining these things very sharply : we, it may be, 
see them in what seems more and more a dissolv- 
ing view ; and we shrink — perhaps in no greater 
humility of spirit than theirs — from the good set 
phrases which they loved. 

It was because of the very difficulty — nay, im- 
possibility — of bringing together the two lines of 
thought here implied, that the metaphysical sym- 
bol of the Trinity was devised, seeming to bring 
the Infinite nearer to the apprehension of the hu- 
man mind; that ardent, emotional theists, like 
Henry Ward Beecher, have said, frankly, "Jesus 
Christ is the only God I know;" nay, that in 
hymns and devotional exercises of many of our 
modern churches the name " God," with the contra- 
dictory attributes it has borne, is quite dropped 
out by an over-scrupulous orthodoxy, and the name 
of the Teacher from Nazareth has been substituted 
in its place. 

A like scrupulosity would forbid the term 
"Father" — unwisely, so long as we accept that 



148 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

term, and all such terms, as symbolic of a relation 
which we can only indicate, not define. Under the 
old notion of the universe, implied in the term " cre- 
ation," the word "Father" was most natural, as 
implying both generation and sovereignty; under 
the new notion implied in "evolution," the term 
" Mother " (which Theodore Parker loved) would 
be still more natural, and just as true, if it were not 
as yet strange and unfamiliar. It is even likely 
that, if the evolution-theory of the universe had 
been as familiar to the Hebrews as it was to the 
Greeks, the feminine symbol would have had a 
fully equal reverence with the other in the noblest 
devotional poetry of the world. Thus we may find 
in Wordsworth's 

" Nature never did betray 
The heart that loved her ; 't is her privilege, 
Through all the years of this our life, to lead 
From joy to joy ; for She can so inform 
The mind that is within us, so impress 
With quietness and beauty, and so feed 
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, 
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, 
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 
The dreary intercourse of daily life, 
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb 
Our cheerful faith that all which we behold 
Is full of blessings," — 

we may find in these exquisite lines a modern or 
Christian parallel to that great verse of the He- 
brew psalmist: "He maketh me to lie down in 
green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still 
waters; He restoreth my soul." 



THE NAME "GOD." 149 

And it is a fairly open question whether the 
name " Jehovah " did not (as Renan thinks) come 
to be substituted in some such way, to suit the ca- 
pacity of the fierce Hebrew clan — for which the 
plural name of Deity, with a far grander and wider 
meaning than of old, was afterwards restored. If 
it was so, it is one more proof of what we have 
been trying to say all along, — that, whatever the 
expanse of our knowledge, whatever the breadth 
of our speculative view, whatever the depth of our 
emotional experience, the soul needs some one 
word absolutely set apart to the single use of 
identifying that largest conception we can frame 
with our ideal of that which is also Right. If that 
universal Law, which is our final generalization 
in the realm of physics, is also (to quote the lan- 
guage of Saint Paul) "holy and just and good," 
there can be no error in defining by the name " God" 
the Life manifest in all things, which it inteprets 
to us. If the realm of physics, taken by itself, is 
dead, having no such life in itself, then we need 
that name for what is beyond it, and includes it. * 

Not, however, because our physical or our meta- 
physical speculation needs to be rounded out for 

* It is obvious that this argument does not apply to the 
name as found in other groups of languages than our own. 
Thus the old Aryan Dyaus (Zevs) signifies, apparently, the ex- 
panse of a material Heaven; Deus (from which Dieu) may add 
to this something of the cheer of Daylight ; the Semitic Elohim 
(Allah) suggests the idea of Force, and Jehovah (Jahveh) that 
of abstract Being. Only the Germanic tongues, so far as we 
know, make the ethical sense the primary one ; and even this 
is denied by some modern philologists. 



150 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

mere completeness' sake. The need is rather that 
of the heart and soul which cry out for the Living 
God. The name, we hold, should be distinctly 
reserved and set apart to denote our reverence for 
the Holiest. It is not that we profess to define or 
comprehend a single one of the properties, or at- 
tributes, that make up what some strangely call 
the "character" of God. It is not that we have 
any private theodicy of our own. and think by the 
charm that is in that name to reconcile in our 
thought the conflict, the mystery, the guilt and 
pain, that make part of all the life we see. All 
that, we have learned long ago. is quite beyond 
our province. But we want to feel still free to 
use a Name which, in its original sense, expressed 
the faith of the heart, that the soul of the universe 
is good : that the Law. which looks so often bleak 
and cruel, which is at best so perplexed and tan- 
gled in its working, is yet -holy and just and 
good." because of the Soul that lives behind it all. 
That is what in its first sense the name God 
means, and all it means : and that is a sense 
which the heart of man will not willingly let die. 



XL 
THE NAME "CHRISTIAN." 

" The disciples were called Christians first in Antioch." 

Tl^HEN that eloquent apostle of the most spir- 
itual faith of India, Protap Chunder Mo- 
zoomdar, made his remarkable address before the 
Ministers' Institute in Lowell, in 1883, he roused 
attention and perhaps some self-inquiry among us 
by saying that, with all reverence for Christ, he 
claimed or desired no share in the name " Chris- 
tian. " His countrymen, he appeared to think, had 
been rather browbeaten by the terror of that name, 
as illustrated in the practice of their conquerors, 
and heartily repudiated it when offered to them as 
the only symbol of salvation. At the same time, 
their imagination and conscience had been stirred 
by the hint of some higher conception of the Divine 
life than they found in their native creeds ; and, 
just as some of us have found certain moods of 
religious thought quickened and moved by aspects 
of Brahmanism or Buddhism, without accepting 
either of those great Oriental faiths, so they were 
drawn by something in the word and spirit that 
gleamed in spite, not in virtue, of the doctrinal 
system taught by Christian missionaries in the 
name of Jesus. 



152 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

This pungent declaration, with what it might 
possibly imply, was brought back to my mind 
while reflecting on the proposition of Dr. James 
Martineau, in a late number of the " Contemporary 
Review, " under the title " The National Church as 
a Federal Union. " The proposal is to give legal 
and official recognition, with certain ecclesiastical 
privileges (hitherto the exclusive property of the 
Church of England), to the whole group of Chris- 
tian sects into which Catholic England has been 
divided. As it is elsewhere more fully stated, 
the proposal is limited by the test of a hundred 
years' corporate existence, and a minimum of two 
hundred associated congregations ; also, it is to be 
assumed, by the common acceptance of the name 
" Christian. " 

Advantage (he says) should be taken of a cer- 
tain " set of the tide in favor of comprehension. " 
What is demanded " is no longer a unity of opin- 
ion, it is a unity of faith. " Seeing the numerous 
Christian bodies, all professing to work for the 
same sacred object, the aim should be — following 
the analogy of the American Federal Union — to 
"cluster them all together as confederated mem- 
bers of a common country, a divine commonwealth, 
with plenty of human work, claiming the heart and 
hand of all. " Further to disarm hostile prejudice, 
it is urged that the object is " not to liberalize the 
[Anglican] Church ; not to give benefices to non- 
Episcopalians ; not to subject the Church to the 
lay control of parishes, — to release it, rather, 
from parliamentary control, and so confirm its 



THE NAME " CHRISTIAN." 153 

religious independence on a broader basis than 
before." The economies pointed out are the dis- 
placing of a vast amount of sectarian machinery 
(which works now clumsily, costlily, and with in- 
terference) for charities and the education of the 
poor, and the simplifying by combination of the 
whole great task of practical Christianity. And 
among the obvious gains is urged, especially, the 
restoring of cathedrals, and other great ecclesi- 
astical foundations of an earlier time, to their 
legitimate service as property of the nation ; with 
the harmonizing and noble effect (such as an 
American in England feels) of sharing or at least 
witnessing, however remotely, the grave and sol- 
emn rendering of the established ritual. 

It may, however, be remarked here that this 
proposal, religiously broad and generous, is logi- 
cally incomplete. It deals with the Church es- 
tablishment and Church endowments as a national 
possession, and the enjoyment of them as a national 
right. But, if we consider the nation, first, in its 
very largest sense, as signifying a British Confed- 
erated Empire (real or supposable), it is not likely 
that one-fourth, possibly not one-tenth, of its popu- 
lation are Christian, nominally or in any other 
sense whatever. In such a view as that, a cathe- 
dral should be, frankly, a temple of Humanity, 
not the possession of a sect or of any group of 
sects. If, next, we think only of the British Isles, 
about one-sixth of their population are Catholics, 
of whom no mention is made in this scheme, and 
who would contumeliously reject such a compro- 



154 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

mise if it were offered, looking forward, as they 
do, to entering some day on what they regard as 
their own inheritance. Or if, lastly, we look at 
England alone, we find not only the various dis- 
senting sects outside the Church, but some of the 
devoutest souls quite outside the boundaries of 
sect. Nay, a bishop of the Established Church 
is recorded to have said not long ago that the 
worshipping assembly of Comtists, having a dis- 
tinct religious profession and aim, is fully entitled 
to be recognized as a religious body, with whatever 
privilege that may imply. And how happens it 
that we have overlooked the Jews ? Surely, they 
have existed as a religious community for "more 
than a hundred years ; " and their Saturday ser- 
vice would be not half so embarrassing to the 
solemnities of the place as the Sunday gathering 
of the Methodists. In short, when we deal with 
a nation, and not a sect, such distinctions as Jew 
and Gentile, Christian and non-Christian, must 
vanish quite away. Moreover, this would be to 
introduce no absurdity, no impossibility. If the 
vast spaces of the cathedrals in the Middle Age 
were open, at fit times and under due regulation, 
to courts and markets and games, surely they may 
well be open now, for their soothing and human- 
izing influence, for any serious attempt to meet 
the problems of the time and organize its higher 
life. The only real difficulty is in those who hold 
the portal key. 

There is another phase of this matter which it 
is well to consider. A recent article bv Canon 



THE NAME " CHRISTIAN." 155 

Fremantle, in the "Fortnightly Review," begins 
with these words : " A professor of divinity, who 
has been thought at times to be by no means insen- 
sible to a reputation for orthodoxy, preaching in the 
University of Oxford a few days ago, said, The 
field of speculative theology may be regarded as 
almost exhausted : we must be content, hencefor- 
ward, to be Christian Agnostics." And this 
statement, he tells us, was "accepted without a 
murmur, " — a thing which could not possibly have 
happened twenty -five years ago. Such is the first 
aspect in Canon Fremantle 's view of "Theology 
under its changed conditions." The phrase he 
uses may possibly puzzle or alarm the reader more 
than it really ought. For " agnostic " is used here 
in its legitimate sense, as the opposite of "gnos- 
tic : " it simply means, " void of speculative theol- 
ogy. " Now, when positive theology — which builds 
its propositions on an assumed definite revelation 
of divine truth to the human understanding — is 
openly or tacitly abandoned, it follows that specu- 
lative theology, which is only its ghost or shadow, 
must also vanish, to be replaced by some reflex of 
the religious thought and life as made known to us 
in human experience. The way of thinking here 
called "agnostic" — while doubtless a confession 
of helpless ignorance on the highest matters of 
speculation — may be as positive, and even helpful, 
as the system of opinion which it displaces. 

It is not however the negative, it is the affirm- 
ative side of the assertion, with which we have to 
do just here. What meaning, if any, lies in the 



156 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

phrase " Christian agnostic " ? Unless the phrase 
is merely and intentionally misleading, it conveys 
something which is supposed to describe a mode 
of current opinion, — of some importance, besides, 
or else it would not be used by an educated theolo- 
gian to describe a body of educated men. In other 
words, what is the meaning of the name " Chris- 
tian," when completely divorced from the whole 
body of doctrinal opinion it was once supposed to 
cover ? 

To this question we shall be apt to answer, first, 
that it means something we have long been quite 
familiar with, and are not in the least alarmed 
about. From the earliest days of our Liberal 
movement, it has been constantly urged that 
" character, not opinion " makes a man's true title 
to the name " Christian. " It is hardly worth 
while to ask too curiously just how logical this pro- 
test has been in the mouths of those who used it. 
Most men doubtless see, or else presume in the 
minds of those they happen to be allied with, a 
nearer reflex of their own views than can safely be 
taken for granted, and so tacitly assume a prem- 
ise which may at an unlucky moment be knocked 
from under their feet. It was so with the theo- 
logical prepossessions which our fathers brought 
over from their orthodox tradition. Their eyes 
were honestly holden, so that they could not see 
all which their argument might imply. But what 
they did see — the abuses of bigotry, the pitfalls of 
casuistry, the peril to freedom of conscience, and 
the vanity of religious professions without that free- 



157 

dom — they saw with a perfect clearness; and the 
positions they took were such as could be held in 
all their integrity through all the changes of opin- 
ion that followed. The newest Radical school has 
never stated those positions with more precision 
and emphasis than were given them by the earliest 
spokesmen of the Liberal protest. And so it hap- 
pens, to our unspeakable advantage, that when the 
momentous revolution in common opinion, already 
spoken of, is fully accomplished, — when " the field 
of speculative theology may be regarded as quite 
exhausted," — we shall still be standing as we 
were before. For those twenty-five years twice 
over we have been used to the maxim that (in 
Channing's phrase) one is to be judged "not by 
the rightness, but by the uprightness, of his opin- 
ions ; " that the name " Christian, " in its only cred- 
itable sense, is to be justified by character, and not 
by doctrinal belief. The purely ethical or spirit- 
ual meaning of it is what we have all along taken 
for granted. 

Further, we are well accustomed to comparisons, 
on sundry points of view, in which the name " Chris- 
tian " is made not at all a term of honour. Our sym- 
pathies hold themselves quite impartial and inde- 
pendent, as between Christian and non-Christian. 
Sir Walter Scott was a loyal and sturdy believer 
of his own day ; but he does not hesitate to enlist 
our admiration for the Jewess Rebecca or the 
Moslem Saladin, as against knights of the most 
valiant order of Christian chivalry. We find our- 
selves, most of us, siding warmly with the Moors 



158 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

in Spain against their conquerors ; we freely own 
the debt of modern learning to Moorish schools ; 
we think with amazement and horror of those pious 
acts of faith by which Queen Isabella secured the 
Christian ascendency in the Peninsula. We are 
amused or pained, as it may be, but never think 
of being angered, by the Turkish boast, " Here you 
may trust any man's word : there are no Christians 
in our village!" In the "ages of faith" it was 
very different. On a certain day (the Sieur de Join- 
ville tells us), as the custom was, the Jews of the 
district were gathered at Cluny by authority of the 
holy King Louis to listen to a sermon and argu- 
ments for their conversion; when an old knight, 
lame and leaning on a crutch, approached. " That 
is no way to deal with these vile heretics ! " he ex- 
claimed ; and forthwith put bluntly to the leading 
Jew one of the chief mysteries of the Catholic 
creed, demanding his assent, which being refused, 
he instantly knocked him down with his crutch. 
To which tale the pious king subjoined, " Only a 
great scholar should reason with a misbeliever: 
the right thing is to thrust your sword into him as 
far as it will go!" Beside such truculent loyalty 
as this, the name " Christian " is quite void of praise 
or blame to our modern ears. We do not passion- 
ately resent neutrality to it, as in time of war we 
do to the name of our country or the folds of its 
flag. We speak it, or we hear it spoken, with as 
little warmth of tone as one should say " Platonist" 
or "Hindoo." 

There is, again, a hostility that goes much far- 



THE NAME " CHRISTIAN." 159 

ther than that indifference. Multitudes of men — 
subjects of merciless conquest by Christian na- 
tions, victims of ecclesiastical or sectarian bigotry, 
oppressed classes jealous of the strength and wealth 
that profess the name in a temper of pure inso- 
lence, free-thinkers exasperated by the mere bald 
hypocrisy of its pretenders — regard the very name 
" Christian " with positive emotions of scorn, wrath, 
hate, or fear. With all these we have to reckon, 
when we look at its signification in a wide way. 
Take, for example, this grotesque travesty of the 
origin of Christianity, which I find in a late num- 
ber of a popular journal : " About the time which 
forms the significant turning-point of our chrono- 
logical era, the nations of the Aryan race were 
stricken with the plague of a moral epidemic. An 
Asiatic pest, the poison of the life-blighting doc- 
trine of pessimism, crept over the moral atmos- 
phere of the mediaeval god-gardens ; for a series of 
centuries the light of reason underwent an eclipse, 
the ethical standards of millions of our ancestors 
were perverted, first by an insidious depreciation, 
and afterward by a remorseless suppression, of their 
normal instincts. " It is easy enough to find his- 
toric facts to verify every item of this bitter indict- 
ment; and that it should be seriously set forth by 
anybody, to explain the existence and power of 
Christianity in the world, — that the whole phe- 
nomenon should be exhibited as a thousand years' 
reign of maniacs and devils, — shows us that we 
cannot always take for granted our complacent, 
home-bred theories. It is our business to bring 



160 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

them out into the light, and prove them, if we can, 
by a better understanding of the facts. 

This is what I shall attempt — not, indeed, to 
do adequately, but to show in what direction it 
should be done. We cannot, as we have just seen, 
any longer take serenely for granted that the rev- 
erence we feel or profess is shared by everybody ; 
and, if the doctrinal opinions once covered by the 
name have faded out of it, it is not by reviving 
those that we can restore the ancient reverence. 
Fortunately, with us, the name " Christian " is a rec- 
ognized name of honour, at least of conventional 
respect. What we have to do is to see, as clearly 
as we can, just what it really means, — not in the 
dialect of theologians, but in the literature of the 
world ; not in the common doctrinal apprehension, 
but as we analyze the very complex elements that 
have gone into, and perhaps displaced, that com- 
mon understanding of it. Well for us if we can 
do this thing successfully; for, indeed, the name 
" Christian "is far more to us than we have yet im- 
plied: it is a name of supreme tenderness, sanc- 
tity, and veneration to innumerable souls, and it 
would be one of the great spiritual losses to the 
human race if it should come to lose that pure 
divine significance. 

Some persons have of late years tried to meet 
the case by identifying Christianity with that col- 
ourless, formless thing they call "absolute relig- 
ion. " A name that grew up in history and belongs 
to history can never be explained in that cheap 
and easy way : it implies form, feature, colour, and 



161 

definite events that shaped it out. The term " ab- 
solute religion " means either a philosophic datum, 
shorn of all such attributes, which would make it 
a very unworthy substitute for what has life and 
feature of its own; or else the common spirit of 
aspiration, virtue, and so on, that remains when 
the specific features of all the great world-relig- 
ions have been shorn away, — a sort of common 
idealizing of them all, — which it would be sheer 
arrogance to claim as the special meaning of any 
one. It was a weakness on the part of Theodore 
Parker, for example, that, while he stood in a 
critical or even unfriendly attitude towards every 
historic form of Christianity in the actual, his 
traditional feeling for the* name led him to do that 
singular injustice. Indeed, its historic forms do 
not seem to have occurred to him as variations or 
even distortions of any common type ; but simply 
as falsities, to be put aside in favour of that phil- 
osophical ideal with which he would not prove 
but assume it to be identical. 

In quite another temper than this, if one is still 
to keep his loyal adhesion to the name " Christian," 
he must accept it — with all its blames and stains 
— in the sense which history has put upon it. 
Historical Christianity, like other historical phe- 
nomena, has been developed under conditions of 
space and time. These have made it something 
very different from that divine ideal which Milton 
imagined of the "perfect shape most glorious to 
look on " of the apostolic age ; very different, again, 

from the philosophical ideal, such as Theodore 

11 



162 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

Parker imagined, which should remain when his- 
toric Christianity should have vanished quite away. 
TTe can respect those gracious and noble ideals, 

but in the business of criticism we cannot abide 
by them. Assuming the human features, we must 
try honestly to see what they were and are ; and, 
as our loyalty holds good at a pinch towards our 
own country and institutions — imperfect as we 
know they are. wicked and corrupt as we often 
charge them to be — better even, perhaps, than 
we should to Plato's ideal Republic if we had the 
luck to live in it. so. it may be, we shall find that 
with a whole heart and a clear conscience we may 
keep good our veneration for this name. also, into 
which we were born. 

Looking at it in this view, there are three as- 
pects of it. by each of which we must try. first, to 
see what its real character and features are. and 
then whether or not we honestly accept it so. 
And in this view, as we must bear in mind, we 
have nothing whatever to do with any of its 
professions of doctrinal belief. 

First, in respect of Time. Christianity, so re- 
garding it. is an historical product, which came 
into being at a definite period of human history, 
and which it should not concern us in the least if 
we should find or imagine likely to pass away, as 
a distinct historic force, in the lapse of time. 
That is. any such theory as that — which is pure 
theory for us. at any rate, since there is no present 
indication whatever that Christianity has done its 
work — oueht not to trouble our minds at all. We 



THE NAME " CHRISTIAN." 163 

have only to ascertain our own relation to an actu- 
ally existing thing. Our real field of study is 
not the metaphysical ideal, but the very tangible 
field of Christian history. And we see at once 
that that is the field in which our own life has 
been nourished, all there is of it. The sap of the 
world's life has come into our own veins through 
the soil of that particular field. As soon as we 
think of any part of our intellectual or spiritual 
inheritance, we see that it has come to us, if not 
always from a Christian source, at any rate through 
a Christian channel. It was, and is, no choice of 
ours whether to inherit that life or not. If our 
modern theories of evolution teach us anything, it 
is that what we may call the subconscious elements 
of our mental and moral life are the most impor- 
tant of all, — those which we have received, like 
the shape of our features and the composition of 
our bones, as they were moulded and dealt out by 
forces acting before our conscious thought, and 
independent of our conscious will. In this sense, 
when we look at the religious side of our life, we 
find ourselves Christian not by choice, but by un- 
conscious inheritance. The act of reason and will 
comes not when we assume that name, but when 
we repudiate it, as we are doubtless free to do. 
But many a good man, who thinks that in that 
way he has outgrown his Christianity and cast it 
off, like a garment moth-eaten and old, would find, 
by a better self-knowledge, that his moral motive, 
his judgment, his ideal, all that we call his con- 
science, was shaped in a mould not of his making, 



164 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

and that every drop of his blood runs Christian, 
to his finger-ends. 

This is what we mean when we say that a man's 
religion is historical, and that he has received it 
by inheritance. It is of comparatively small im- 
portance whether or not he recognize the fact: 
what we want is to see the fact itself. It is 
not likely that Napoleon knew or cared anything 
about the laws of heredity, as philosophers state 
them, when he showed in their most virulent 
form all the traits of his Corsican inheritance. 
He was none the less a Corsican to the last fibre 
of his frame. When we speak of a religion as 
historic, we mean that it was secreted and devel- 
oped under definite conditions that helped make 
it what it was. It has evolved a type of its own, 
which stands out like the individuality of a man 
or a tree, qualifying every drop of blood, giving 
savour to every slightest trickling of the sap. It 
is not, of course, easy to look through the innu- 
merable subtypes and variations that have appeared 
in the course of centuries among countless groups 
that we include under the one name, and see just 
how the common type appears in all, — looking, as 
we must,- from the outside and far away. But it 
is perfectly easy for any one person, tracing his 
own spiritual descent from the common stock, to 
see just how and where and what it is. Not an 
opinion, not an aspiration, not a hope, not an 
emotion of fellowship, not a moral judgment, not 
a movement of penitence or praise, that does not 
take its tone and colouring from the invisible forces 



THE NAME "CHRISTIAN." 165 

that have run in the blood of fifty Christian gen- 
erations ; and, in comparison with that fact of the 
higher science, it is of very small account indeed 
whether he confess the fact under the name " Chris- 
tian " or under some other name. 

Secondly, in respect of Space. As to this, it is 
not of so much consequence to say that Christian- 
ity has spread very widely in the world, as it is to 
see that it has been limited and defined by bound- 
aries. Nature, it may be, and as Ruskin tells 
us, knows nothing of outlines ; but she covers all 
her live products very carefully up in protecting 
surfaces. There must be, besides, some relation 
— which we do not always understand very well — 
between the growth and the soil or climate. Why 
Christianity should be accepted by one race treach- 
erous and fierce, like the Frank, and rejected by an- 
other race thoughtful and humane, like the Hindoo, 
it is hard to tell; and we need not trouble our- 
selves with such questions: we must accept the 
fact. Our present business with the fact is to call 
up what is really very curious when we come to 
think upon it, — that in matters of race-sympathy 
we are so little controlled by moral judgment, so 
much by the pulse of that unconscious heredity 
spoken of before. 

To illustrate: it happens that the great con- 
flicts of history known to us have mostly been be- 
tween those (like the Greeks and Persians) nearly 
alike wide of us in race and faith, or else those 
(as the French and English) both so near that 
other reasons sway our preference, if we have any. 



166 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

But it is a sentiment that runs deeper and shows 
itself in subtler ways, when a visible type of re- 
ligious affinity, like the symbol of the Cross, 
touches us with a sense that possibly our better 
reason might disown. All the education we have 
got from historical criticism and moral judgment 
does not alter much our involuntary sympathetic 
admiration of the ferocious and disastrous advent- 
ure of the Crusades ; and, Cross against Crescent, 
we have very likely been swayed just so in our un- 
conscious sympathies on the ever-recurrent strug- 
gle in the East. There was founded in Europe, 
over a thousand years ago, what Comte calls a 
"synergy" of nations, including a group of Catho- 
lic populations that came to share a common polit- 
ical consciousness, and had its natural ally in the 
Eastern Empire. That common consciousness, 
half political, half religious, has made one of the 
great factors in modern history ; and, as we reflect 
upon it, we shall see that its force is very far from 
being spent, even yet. We do not go into histori- 
cal proofs or illustrations : we merely hint the fact 
essential to our understanding of the name " Chris- 
tian " in its real breadth of meaning. Mr. Johnson, 
in his " Persia, " has finely told with what vigorous 
sweep of imaginative sympathy the poet Firdusi 
gathered into one vast epic the most widely scat- 
tered traditions of the great Iranian race. With 
some suggestion like that, the obscurest and most 
ignorant of Christian sects, through scripture, 
hymn, or missionary appeal, has had its imagina- 
tion lifted and widened, so as to take in, however 



167 

dimly, grotesquely, feebly, a sweep of vision that 
marvellously supplements the narrowness of its 
traditionary creed. 

Thirdly, in respect of Quality. If we try to put 
clearly to our thought the precise task and the best 
task which Christianity had to undertake, as a 
factor in human history, we shall find it to have 
been the long, slow, and hard task, to create a new 
type of social order, — that of antiquity being rot- 
ten and effete, that of barbarism being gross and 
rude. The essentials of that task were done dur- 
ing the terrible transition of what we call the 
Dark Age, — say from the fifth century through the 
eighth, — while the elements of it, and the law of 
its development, are found in its incessant refer- 
ence, at every point, to the ethics of the New Tes- 
tament. The process by which this was done 
makes the real significance in Christian history of 
what we know, very inadequately, as the creation 
of Canon Law. Our present business with it is 
this, — that from the type of social morals thus de- 
veloped we have all inherited and grown, dropping 
some features, adding others, but keeping those 
most fundamentally characterizing it; so that, 
when we speak of Christian civilization, society, 
or morals, in distinction from Mussulman or Ori- 
ental, we know pretty accurately what we mean. 

It does not follow that we prefer it always, or at 
all points, to other types or other forms of social 
life ; still less that those trained to another will 
admit the superiority of ours. A few years ago, 
Lutfullah, a cultivated Mahometan Hindoo, a trav- 



168 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

eller in England, made in the delightful record of 
his journey an elaborate comparison, on moral 
grounds, of English with Mahometan customs, 
particularly in regard to what we think our strong- 
est points, family life and the treatment of women ; 
deciding gravely in favor of the Oriental. On 
some other points, such as temperance and honesty 
in trade, we might perhaps more readily assent 
But it is not at all necessary to decide such ques- 
tions as that, absolutely or comparatively. What 
we are more or less conscious of, whether we clearly 
admit it to ourselves or not, is that — quite inde- 
pendent of our individual standard of right and 
wrong — such a difference exists; and that such 
qualities as we have are to be grown and ripened 
after our own (that is, the Christian) type of social 
ethics, and not that belonging to other peoples or 
other lands. . 

Comparing one time or faith or people with 
another, we are, indeed, far more apt to see the 
difference than the likeness, and to imagine that 
there is little or nothing in common. Even near 
neighbours are intolerant of their small differences ; 
and, when it comes to aliens in race or faith, the 
feeling deepens to hatred and contempt. At the 
first hint of social customs that have grown up, 
unblamed, under the oldest and richest of the 
" ethnic" religions, — the Turkish harem with its 
eunuch-guard, the Hindoo Zenana and Suttee, the 
systematic infanticide of China, — we regard them 
with the same sort of abhorrence that we do the 
tattooing and cannibalism of a Polynesian tribe: 



169 

a feeling which is in part purely moral, but is in 
good part the mere antipathy and loathing which 
bespeak alienation of race and faith. 

It does not belong to my argument to go here 
into any full description of what I have called 
the " Christian " type. That would be, indeed, to 
forestall the tens of thousands of excellent sermons 
which will be preached next Sunday in exposition 
of its several points; for men, like bees, toil un- 
consciously together in the dark, working out the 
one pattern which an unseen Architect has pre- 
scribed to them all alike. What I have aimed to 
do, all I have aimed to do, is to insist on the 
manifest but forgotten fact that there is such a 
type of character as I have spoken of; and to 
urge that this, not doctrinal or ecclesiastical defi- 
nitions, is where we must seek the proper meaning 
of the name " Christian. " That name, as most 
of us will admit, has quite lost its doctrinal sig- 
nification; but it still means to us something, 
and that something is very precious and sacred and 
dear. 

I have spoken of it, indeed, in terms of charac- 
ter, morality, social custom. These are compara- 
tively obvious and coarse. Where we feel the 
deeper and nobler meaning of the term is rather in 
the region of emotion, — of aspiration, contrition, 
sympathy, trust, hope, and joy. For these we should 
seek quite another sort of symbol, — one which 
we might find, perhaps, in the common sentiment 
that runs through the myriad " hymns of the ages ; " 
but still more purely in that unique form of Chris- 



170 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

tian art which we call ecclesiastical music, — not 
including the florid modern " quartette, " which is 
an outgrowth of the Pagan Renaissance, having 
nothing to do with Christian worship; but what 
is at once manlier, tenderer, and nobler, and has 
grown from a million longings, sorrows, hopes, 
and prayers of many generations. It is, after all, 
but a single type, from the simple Gregorian chant 
up to the stupendous strains of Mozart's Requiem. 
For ourselves, wonted as we are to the most ster- 
ile and rationalizing forms of Protestant religious 
thought, we have never witnessed a genuine monu- 
ment, relic, or ceremonial, such as older countries 
are so rich in, of a faith that was once hot and 
fervid, in form however widely differing from our 
own, without a deep powerful thrill of sympathy, 
pride, awe, gladness, — spontaneous, and from a 
source back of conscious thought, independent cer- 
tainly of all doctrinal assent. The blood of that 
life is thicker than the water of our thin clear 
logic. 

Of course, we understand that nineteen-twen- 
tieths of the Christian world would treat our 
pretension of spiritual fellowship with scorn and 
contumely. The visible symbol and the spoken 
creed make the ordinary test, and not the "wit- 
ness of the Spirit," of which I have spoken. The 
most radical and the most conservative of us stand 
together on the equal level of that all but univer- 
sal "Christian" contempt. But our business is 
with the fact, not with men's imaginations or in- 
terpretations of the fact. The scornful denial of 



171 

the nineteen-twentieths does not cancel the law 
under which we inherit. It does not prevent us 
from saying, in perfect good faith and loyalty, that, 
by no choice of ours, but by birthright and inevita- 
bly, the name " Christian" includes us also, form- 
ing an ineradicable element in our higher life. 



XII. 

THE WORLD-RELIGIONS. 

An address spoken before the London Ministers' Conference, 
May 30, 1890. 

A BOUT eight years ago, in the university town 
where I reside, there happened an event 
which impressed me very deeply as significant of 
a certain change which has come about, quite re- 
cently, in our intellectual attitude towards the 
great Religions of mankind beyond the pale of 
Christendom. 

A Chinese mandarin, a man known as a scholar 
and a poet among his own people, an instructor in 
the University, whose gentle and courteous man- 
ner and rich Oriental costume had made him a 
marked and welcome figure in our streets, — where 
his wife, tottering on her " little goat-feet " (as the 
Abbe Hue calls them), and his children waddling 
at their side, heavily swathed in their felts and 
padded silks, were often companions of his walk, 
— had died; and his funeral, with official cere- 
mony severely simple, was held in the College 
Chapel. At the head of the procession, beside the 
President, walked the eldest son, a lad of four- 
teen, clad from head to foot with white cap and 
robe, the mourning costume of the Chinese. The 



THE WORLD-RELIGIONS. 173 

funeral service was conducted by the head of the 
Faculty of Theology. And here was the great — 
though seemingly almost unnoticed — interest of 
the occasion. For all the rest may have been but 
spectacle and form; but here was the interpreting 
word, to be spoken by a scholar of singular purity 
and refinement of thought, deeply read in the lit- 
erature of the Oriental religions, who, with a fe- 
licity of phrase that seemed unconscious of itself, 
and a simplicity of effect that was the touch of 
genius, taught us the lesson of the hour. 

The charm of that simplicity, I think, beguiled 
most of those who heard him from recognizing at 
the moment the singularity — almost I might call 
it the revolutionary daring — of the words he spoke. 
The University had been founded in the severest 
faith of the Puritans for the instruction of their 
own ministry, and had continued for nearly two 
hundred and fifty years strictly true to the essen- 
tials of Puritan thought and form. The Chapel 
was dedicated to a worship strictly and even aus- 
terely Christian, though under the most liberal 
interpretation of that name; the speaker was the 
official expounder, of the highest rank known in 
the University, of the form and learning of its re- 
ligious thought. Yet the words he spoke were the 
clear recognition of that most modern of religious 
conceptions, — that in spiritual dignity the great 
religions of mankind stand (in the ratio of their 
intellectual range, or moral purity) on the same 
equal level. In the brotherhood of the Spirit there 
is no room for condemnation, or even for so much 



174 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

of contempt as may be implied in the tolerance, of 
other forms of faith. The speaker praised the dead 
professor for having remained three years true to 
his ovm Pagan creed, though surrounded by Chris- 
tian influences and forms of thought which he did 
his best to interpret into his own religious dialect. 
His reading of the Scriptures was in the phrases 
of Confucius and Mencius, adding only the brief 
comment, more familiar to our ears: "Xowlsee 
of a truth that God is no respecter of persons ; for 
in every nation he that feareth God and worketh 
righteousness is accepted of him." And in the fu- 
neral prayer he gave thanks not (as most of us 
have been wont to do) for the salvation that came 
by Christ only, but for the Word that spake through 
the mouth of those far-away prophets of an alien 
faith. 

Brothers, and fellow-students of that same Divine 
Word ! I have dwelt long, perhaps, on this single 
illustration, because it really tells us all I have to 
say, so far as the range, the heart, or the vindica- 
tion of my topic is concerned. I have no argu- 
ment to offer, and no rhetorical phrase in which 
to plead, for that wonderful expansion of the faith 
we were brought up in, which has come to pass (I 
may say) before our very eyes. For the process 
it implies is one that belongs wholly to the last 
half-century, or a little more, of which manv among 
us here have been eye-witnesses. I remember what 
an interest it was among us, when I was a child, 
and Rammohun Roy was a visible presence known 
and loved among our friends in England , — the in- 



THE WORLD-RELIGIONS. 175 

terest, that a Hindoo Rajah, a Brahmin of purest 
caste, should accept for himself and diligently in- 
terpret to his people "the precepts of Jesus, the 
guide to peace and happiness : " no mere convert, 
either, in the vulgar sense, renouncing his own 
that he might receive another's; for when, as we 
were told, he died and was buried among you, it 
was his last care that the scarlet thread should not 
be disturbed that marked his spiritual rank, and 
showed that he had not forsaken his people's elder 
faith. That, I think, was the first example that 
brought home to us the fact of spiritual brother- 
hood, which no boundaries of Christian or non- 
Christian may divide. And when, not quite seven 
years ago, the superb and fervid eloquence of Pro- 
tap Chunder Mozoomdar was spoken to a congre- 
gation of our ministerial brethren in America, it 
not only lifted us, in imagination and sympathy, 
far above the level where those boundaries may in- 
terfere, but taught us another lesson of humility 
as well; for, said he, while I accept Christ him- 
self as my teacher and my master, yet Christianity 
has not hitherto shown itself to us in such a shape 
and spirit, that we ourselves desire or are willing 
to be known as Christians. 

Indeed, I cannot think that Christianity has gen- 
erally shown itself in an attractive attitude or as- 
pect to those of alien faiths. And here I do not 
speak merely of its conquering and domineering 
temper. For it is not always so. If we recall the 
names of Heber, Martyn, Brainerd, Colenso, Liv- 
ingstone, we shall find as noble examples as in 



176 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

all religious history, of tenderness, patience, devo- 
tion, heroism, justice, — virtues that impress most 
profoundly the common heart; but almost always 
with some tacit assumption that robs them greatly 
of their charm. The tone is apt to be patronizing, 
not brotherly. I do not undertake, however, here 
to criticise either the temper or the results of so 
noble an enterprise as that of Christian missions, 
which, as soon as we look at it a little closely, fills 
us with humility and astonishment. We only 
wish to see as clearly as we can the change of 
mental attitude which the years have brought 
about. 

It has been said that in one of the Xew England 
coast-towns — and probably in others — the first 
liberalizing influence upon the old Puritan theol- 
ogy came from merchants and shipmasters of the 
East India trade. As soon as they came into those 
warmer latitudes, their crust of prejudice melted 
and cracked from them like films of ice; and, in 
place of the narrow tradition they took out with 
them, they brought home the germs of a broad re- 
ligion of humanity. That was about a hundred 
years ago. And since then, as we know, the wide 
study of the world-religions has created whole 
libraries of a new literature, a new philosophy, a 
new ethics, a new sense of fellowship, that have 
quite revolutionized the relation in which the great 
faiths of mankind stand together. 

In the main, the result of this century of new 
thought bearing that way would appear to be 
placid acceptance among Christian scholars of 



THE WORLD-RELIGIONS. 177 

what we have learned to call comparative mythol- 
ogy, comparative - ethics, comparative religion. 
The first effect is tolerance — a neutral effect; a 
rather passive than active, and a somewhat dis- 
abling virtue. For, as we must remember, most 
religions of the world are fiercely intolerant: if 
our generous optimist, who discourses glowingly 
of that universal faith in which all local or race- 
creeds are presently to be merged, should seriously 
offer his alluring compromise to the Sultan of 
Turkey or the Shah of Persia (who was lately 
mobbed in his own palace for accepting the gift of 
a Christian Bible), without the backing of English 
cannon, he would run imminent risk of instant be- 
heading or impalement — unless they should think 
him an inspired madman^ and so shut him up to 
be worshipped as a' saint! So that it is of great 
interest to us to see, if we can, what response our 
word of universal brotherhood is like to get from 
that heathendom which we so long to gather to 
our arms. 

It would appear that we have not far to go for a 
very cordial response from the heart of Paganism 
to the common ethics and the common religious 
sentiment, which are the spiritual bond of our 
common brotherhood. A few months ago, a meet- 
ing was called in Boston of six or eight gentlemen 
who were to confer with a highly intelligent and 
educated Japanese government envoy touching the 
prospects of a liberal Christianity in Japan. The 
conversation (which I was present at) was a long 
and interesting one ; but perhaps the most signifi- 

12 



178 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

cant tiling in it was when this envoy said that, 
for his part, he saw no difference between a liberal 
Christian and a liberal Buddhist : neither of them 
made account of creeds, and their virtues were 
just the same. Now this remark of his may have 
been the profound insight of one who had studied 
the moral characteristics and penetrated to the 
spiritual identity ; or it may have been the shallow 
surface view of one incapable of knowing the vast 
ethnic forces, the conflicts and revolutions of past 
history, the enormous growth of tradition that like 
the life of forests has melted into the very subsoil 
of regions a whole diameter apart, which make 
every drop of blood run different in the veins of 
each, and nurture a life of another characteristic 
flavour, that courses in every capillary tube or retic- 
ulation of vital tissue woven beneath the skin. 

I have tried sometimes to understand how this 
thing really looks to a member of those vast pop- 
ulations, of a civilization and a culture twenty cen- 
turies older than our own, with whom the gates of 
intercourse have been suddenly thrown wide open 
to us within the last thirty years. How far can 
the great Christian tradition, which is so familiar 
and living a thing to us, possibly be made real or 
intelligible to them ? In meeting them we are 
baffled first by their exceeding grace and courtesy, 
which seem all along to assume a perfect under- 
standing with us though they have it not ; and then 
by that fine and subtile intelligence of theirs, which 
catches so deftly at the novel thought, and seems to 
grasp the sense at first hint of the elusive phrase. 



THE WORLD-RELIGIONS. 179 

I should like to know how they explain the same 
thought amongst themselves in that dialect of 
theirs, which so defies » our plainest maxims of 
grammar, idiom, and logic. 

In this quest I went once, about five years ago, 
into an evening congregation of Chinamen in Cal- 
ifornia, who (I suppose) considered themselves to 
be Presbyterian Christian converts. The Scrip- 
ture lesson of the day was comprehensible enough, 
— the parable of the Prodigal Son; and it burned 
"upon my lips to say a word of its touching appli- 
cation to these myriads of younger sons — for to the 
eye the Chinese population there is almost a pop- 
ulation of boys — who have gathered together their 
poor little substance, and come into that far coun- 
try with quite another thought than to spend it in 
riotous living. How could Christianity look to 
them otherwise than as a malign power, that 
chilled them with its icy reception, and scourged 
them by its cruel contempt ? It was very strange 
to listen to their rude attempt to sing a Christian 
hymn in the uncouth accents of that alien tongue ; 
still stranger, to listen to their chanted recitation of 
the Ten Commandments and the Apostles' Creed. 
Did that grave code of Ethics rebuke, mockingly 
perhaps, the lawlessness they and their brethren 
had been helpless victims of ? Could those ancient 
mysteries and symbols of Christian faith — could 
the words "Messiah," "Redemption," "Atone- 
ment," which they so fluently repeated — possibly 
carry to their thought anything of the inspiration, 
solemnity, or awe with which they are listened to 



180 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

by those who inherit a tradition running back into 
far ages of faith ? or ought we to desire that they 
should ? 

Questions such as these I could not avoid as they 
pressed themselves upon me, and the nearest an- 
swer I could give was this. These helpless stran- 
gers, cast in ignorant multitudes upon our shore, 
would fain learn the spell of that mighty, superb, 
victorious, implacable Christian civilization, which 
came to them in armoured ships and with all the 
formidable equipment of modern science. They 
would search our Scriptures, to see if in any wise 
they might find the key to that great and terrible 
mystery which the invading life of the West must 
be to them. If they could only catch the syllables 
aright, — if they could only pronounce the Open 
Sesame of that obscure world of strange arts, en- 
chantments, and deadly spells, and a remorseless 
strength as of a demon-realm, — might there not 
be even yet some defence for that rude, gigantic, 
massive, but in comparison inert and helpless sys- 
tem of things, in which they and their fathers had 
been nourished ? 

But to come back now to our own proper point 
of view. I do not think we ought to be content 
with the placid contemplation of that wider hori- 
zon of ethics, or of speculative theory, which is 
open to us now that our narrow doctrinal tradi- 
tions of the past, so sacred and dear to us through 
long generations, are dissolved in the free air of 
modern thought. 

And it is not only, it is not even chiefly, this in- 



THE WORLD-RELIGIONS. 181 

tellectual expansion that I have in mind. When 
we speak of the "world-religions," we think first, 
indeed, of that which makes them world-posses- 
sions, not local, hut universal. That impassioned 
Brahmanic poetry of nature, with its gorgeous sym- 
bolism that has gone through Greek channels into 
the very heart of modern culture; the childlike, 
quaint, ethical wisdom of China ; those tender mys- 
tic dreams of the Buddhists, which throw so curi- 
ous a sidelight on the Christian gospel ; the heroic 
temper of the Parsee epic of Right and Wrong ; the 
fierce, remorseless loyalty of the faith of Islam, — 
we begin by adding the memory and the meaning 
of these to enrich our studies of Religion in its 
larger sense. But we have chiefly to bear in mind 
its deeper sense. What is it that has made each of 
these race-creeds a sacred and inalienable posses- 
sion to its own people ? What has made it to them 
not a theory of the universe only, or a rule of con- 
duct only, but a religion, devoutly and passionately 
clung to, as the very soul of that nation's life ? 
This question lies at the heart of the matter we 
are considering; and our answer to it will show 
us just where our touch with those world-religions 
may not dilute and weaken, but reinvigorate our 
own faith. 

That answer we shall find in the fact that each 
has been received by its disciples not as a thing of 
human instruction or device, but as a revealed 
religion ; and then, in considering attentively what 
it is we really mean by that phrase. Beneath all 
our speculations and discussions in this field one 



182 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

constant element remains, — namely this, however 
we may explain the phrase : that what we truly call 
Religion first enters as a living fact into the expe- 
rience of a man's life " when he finds himself, in 
whatever way, face to face with the Eternal," 

That experience, I think, comes home to us in 
every deeper crisis of our own life, glad or pain- 
ful, — when we are sensible (as it were) of living 
touch with that Presence 

" Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns," 

as the old Aryan poets saw and felt it, or when we 
have to face the Adversary that must be met and 
overcome in the battle of life, as in Jacob's wrestle 
with the Phantom of the night. But very few are 
those chosen and gifted souls to whom the things 
of the Spirit are the only real things ; whose whole 
life (to our human vision) is spent in the immedi- 
ate presence of the Eternal. Of such are the holy 
men and seers, to whom the veil is removed, so 
that, like Moses, they "see God face to face and 
live ; " to whom the things of the higher life are 
directly revealed — by insight, not outsight — so 
that they become the revealers of them in turn to 
other men. Every great and powerful faith that 
has grown into a world-religion, so as to be ac- 
cepted by millions and cherished through long 
generations, had its origin, it is likely, in the rev- 
elation so made through a gifted prophet-soul. 

Now the actual subject-matter so revealed may 
be dimmed and distorted through lapse of time; 
its elements, if we could see them as they really 



THE WORLD-RELIGIONS. 183 

were, might seem to us very meagre and crude; 
the world's great life, historic, ethic, intellectual, 
may long ago have absorbed all that was worth 
keeping in it, so that the costly casket that en- 
shrines it may be as good as empty : still there is 
the significance of that first fact, which is perpet- 
ually valuable to us. For the race and age that 
first received it, it was the revelation of the high- 
est law of life — of conduct, of human relation, of 
ultimate destiny — which that race or age was able 
to apprehend ; and so it stood for them as a revela- 
tion of the Highest, the Absolute, the Divine. 
And it is this element in it, which it is our first 
business to detect and explore by some kindred 
faculty in ourselves. 

When, accordingly, we set ourselves to under- 
stand the religion of a remote age or people, our 
proper task is not to interpret a particular cosmol- 
ogy, or mythology, or theory of the Divine nature, 
or form of apprehension respecting a future life: 
these are but side-hints and indications of the 
direction in which we have to look. It is not to 
study a code of ethics, shaped out by circumstances 
far remote and unlike our own, so as cunningly 
to trace its root in our common nature, or see how 
it has led to conduct and custom which we can ob- 
serve from the outside, as we study the ways of 
bees and ants. It is, to see for ourselves, if we 
can 5 how that element of experience which we have 
called vision of the Eternal has entered as a live 
fact into the individual soul. When Mencius 
says, "I like life, and I also like righteousness: 



184 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

if I cannot keep the two together, I will let life 
go and choose righteousness," we must lay that 
saying to heart in the same shrine where we keep 
those other words : " He that saveth his life shall 
lose it, and he that loseth it shall keep it unto life 
eternal. " 

It is of small account to discuss the date and 
authorship and literary phenomena of the Penta- 
teuch: what we really want to know is what is 
meant by Abraham's call, and the sacrifice of 
Isaac, and Jacob's wrestle in the night-visions by 
the ford Jabbok, — after which crisis he is known 
as Israel, " Prince of God, " and the ,wrongs and 
meannesses of his youth are all washed away ; and 
what it was that Moses saw in the Burning Bush, 
so that from that hour he was no longer a timid fu- 
gitive or a dreaming exile, but a world-hero and a 
prophet of Jehovah! It is of small account that 
we have mastered all the schools of New Testa- 
ment criticism, that we can place every incident 
in its right setting, and give the true interpreta- 
tion of every text: our real lesson — however you 
may explain the highly symbolic language I am 
obliged to use — is what we find at the heart of the 
Gospel of Christ, and is recorded for us in the im- 
agery of the Baptism, the Temptation, the Trans- 
figuration, and the Cross, telling how that living 
touch with the Eternal made the Man of Nazareth 
a messenger to all souls from the Most High, 
speaking as Son of Man to all the Sons of 
Men ! 



THE WORLD-RELIGIONS. 185 

And now, brothers and friends, why is it that I 
have thought it worth while to bring this one 
thought from so far a distance, and to gather its 
echoes into one focus from that wide whispering- 
gallery which the great faiths of the world, broadly 
explored and deeply pondered, have become to us ? 
It is because we are ourselves messengers and in- 
terpreters, to the heart of our own generation, of 
the same Eternal Word. We must seek the hint 
of it in our own heart, touched by the vivid expe- 
rience of our own passing life. We shall hear the 
echo of it, if we listen to those voices — of hope, 
grief, awe, passion, lamentation — that come to us 
out of the heart of our own time. God hath never 
left himself without witness ; and we must listen, 
before we have a right to speak. That burden is 
laid upon us now, and is the real meaning of all 
our painful endeavours and our weary search after 
what we deem the Truth. Like those processes 
of painful initiation at the Greek mysteries, so the 
degrees we take in filling out our course of prepar- 
atory study are steps towards the inner sanctuary, 
where the veil is taken away and we see face to 
face. 

For the vision we look for must be found in 
the immediate life of our own time. Here or no- 
where is for us the presence of the Living God, 
We may be sure — nay, we may see with our own 
eyes if they be not dimmed by prejudice and old 
conceit — that a new world-religion is laboring to 
the birth among us, even now, which will doubt- 
less be clear revelation to our children's children, 



186 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

though most men's hearts are hardened so that 
they do not see it now. " The younger generation 
are happier than we," said the statesman Cavour, 
" because they will live to see that greatest of his- 
torical events, the birth of a new religion. " 

Our first reason for believing it is this: that, 
such is the constitution of our human nature, a 
system of knowledge, opinion, belief, in proportion 
as it is clearly and symmetrically held, — a system 
of social right and obligation, as it becomes uni- 
form, fixed, and orderly, — much more, an inspi- 
ration of duty, or an aspiration towards a more 
perfect justice and a nobler life, when shared by 
a generous contagion among the hearts of a kin- 
dred multitude, — has a tendency to beget a sense 
of sacredness, a personal homage and allegiance, 
a moral enthusiasm that absorbs all individual de- 
sire, interest, or hope, and clothes itself in the 
qualities characteristic of the religious life. Each 
of the three, — the intellectual ardor, the social 
instinct, the moral heroism, — when it attains its 
purest form and lifts itself towards its own ideal, 
becomes an avenue by which the soul may come to 
dwell in the realm of the Eternal. And when, 
for any era, people, or man, the three are per- 
fectly harmonized and blended, then the condi- 
tions are made ready for the Eternal Spirit to 
come and make its tabernacle among men. 

Now we may clearly see that the spiritual un- 
rest of our time — nay, its very scepticism, pessi- 
mism, and unbelief — is the symptom of a mental 
struggle,, which if wisely guided will be a victori- 



THE WORLD-RELIGIONS. 187 

ous advance, to that " higher synthesis " of thought 
and life, which is the nearest definition we can 
get of what may be a world-religion in the coming 
day. For some three centuries, natural science 
has been feeling its way in a wilderness of unex- 
plored facts ; so that our mind is caught, as it 
were, in a thicket, and no longer discerns the path 
of life that seemed so plain and easy to our fathers. 
It is only within our later recollection that its last 
and highest generalizations seem to be shaping 
themselves to a new and completer world-concep- 
tion, which will be in better harmony with our 
thoughts of the higher spiritual life. In the realm 
of politics and society, a four centuries' struggle 
has been going on since the violent collapse of the 
Mediaeval Order which had given a certain unity 
to the higher civilization for near a thousand years ; 
and we find ourselves in an age of revolution, when 
men's social ideals are separated by a wide and 
ghastly gulf from existing fact. But it is surely 
only a reasonable hope, that the astonishing ad- 
vance which our century has witnessed in indus- 
trial development and material wealth or power 
will be followed in the new century we are so soon 
to enter on by a corresponding development of so- 
cial justice, the harmony of liberty and order on a 
far vaster scale than any that has been seen as yet. 
An age of Reason should naturally be followed by 
an age of Faith. 

And again, when we consider the realm of the 
individual life: the domain of scientific necessity 
has seemed to widen and encroach, till it threat- 



188 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

ened to wrap and enfold all the elements of our 
nobler being, and a generation is growing up that 
"have not so much as heard whether there be any 
Holy Ghost." This, I say, is the present first 
effect of that invasion of the realm of conscience 
by the rude advance of materialistic discovery. 
It must needs be that this tribulation come to per- 
plex our understanding ; but it only shows the new 
conditions under which the old problem of man's 
life has to be studied, and the soul must win new 
victories of faith. That problem is not to be sim- 
plified by suppressing or evading any of its terms. 
All the elements of a vaster universe, a more com- 
plex order of society, an increasing intricacy of 
motive and perplexity in the relations of man to 
man, — all these must be met and conquered, one 
by one, before the Voice can cry again in the wil- 
derness, " The way of the Lord is prepared, and in 
the desert is made straight a highway for our 
God." 

And yet, that result we may be sure will follow, 
— as sure as that intelligent, wise, and devoted 
men will survive, who will give their lives to the 
task which it implies. But it is best not to con- 
tent ourselves with prophecy. The salvation we 
seek is not a far-off joy : it is a present consecra- 
tion. It is our particular privilege, that, while we 
keep in our heart all the gracious sanctities and 
the living tradition of past ages of faith, absolutely 
nothing stands in the way to hinder the clear 
vision of a new heaven and a new earth, wherein 
shall dwell a more perfect righteousness. As stu- 



THE WORLD-RELIGIONS. 189 

dents of the Christian record we have listened to 
the voices of the Past, that have told us something 
of the life within those walls, set four-square, of 
the New Jerusalem which ancient seers beheld, 
"coming down from God out of heaven," in vi- 
sions that have long comforted the fainting hope 
of men. But now we must look forward, not back ; 
for, lo ! before our very eyes those walls of separa- 
tion, so long the necessary bulwarks and defences 
of that hope, are crumbling down visibly. We must 
look out, not in, that we may the better see how 
not one narrow enclosure only, but the Earth is 
the Lord's and the fulness thereof, the World and 
they that dwell therein I 

And for us as Christian workers there can be no 
higher privilege than this: to do our own part, 
ever so little and ever so weak, to make that vi- 
sion of a broader Religion of Humanity something 
alive and real in the world. I am not at all sure 
that this means any change visible to the naked 
eye in the outer frame of things we live in — the 
institutions and the organizations of society. 
" The kingdom of heaven cometh not with obser- 
vation," nor is it a thing which the violent can 
take by force. Religion consists not in what a 
man or an age has already attained — whether of 
knowledge, belief, opinion; or whether of institu- 
tion, custom, or set form. "We are saved by 
Hope, " says Paul : by hope, not achievement ; by 
faith, not works. Religion consists in exalting 
men's ideal of what is right and necessary to be 
done, — thus kindling their faith in something for 



190 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

which they are strong to live, to suffer, or to die. 
It is not the building of a Temple, -which, is a task 
for men's hands and skill, with noise of hammers ; 
but it is like the breath of Spring, which silently 
creates ten thousand forms of fresh spontaneous 
life, each after the law of its own kind. Its 
prophets and interpreters are few, but its power 
goes forth upon many ; for those few are they who 
have entered most deeply into the life of their own 
time, and so can best guide its action towards the 
noblest ends. 

These noblest ends, as our time conceives them, 
lie chief of all, doubtless, in the direction of social 
justice and equal right. And that purely spiritual 
vision, vouchsafed to few, must take its form and 
colouring from that great nineteenth-century inspi- 
ration. If ever so few and weak, it is theirs to 
make the vision a living reality. Their face is 
set and their steps are bent, in this our day, not 
towards any New Jerusalem with its golden streets 
and its songs of joy for the Elect, but towards a 
vaster City of God, whose law is the more perfect 
reconciliation of Eternal Right with the common 
life of men; in whose light we shall see plainly 
how the many world-religions of the Past were but 
steps, ordered in the universal Providence, that 
have led to the one grander world-religion of the 
Future, 



PART II. 



FRAGMENTS AND HINTS. 



WITNESS TO THE TRUTH. 

" We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen." 

A CERTAIN witness before a court of justice, 
describing the incident he was summoned 
to testify upon, went on to say, " I thought " this 
or that; when he was instantly stopped by the 
counsel : " We don't want to know what you 
thought : tell us what you know ! " He had just 
been sworn to "tell the truth, the whole truth, 
and nothing but the truth ; " and this, he was 
given thus sharply to understand, did not include 
his own opinion about the truth. That formula, 
in its incessant repetition in the ears of every wit- 
ness, is a standing confession that what society 
wants most, and demands first of all, is simple 
truth of fact. 

"Opinion in good men," says Milton, "is truth 
in the making. " But for the uses of human life 
what we generally want is truth ready-made. And 
it occurred to this witness, in thinking over the 
matter afterwards, that it is just the same with 
truth as to the order of the universe, the law of 
life, the obligation of virtue, the destiny of the 
soul or of the world: once sifted down, what we 
say about these things, on which we spend so 
much of our rhetoric or our sentiment, is a state- 
ment of what is true or false in fact, as much as 

13 



194 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

the testimony of a witness in an action for assault 
and battery. For any real or permanent use, its 
value depends not on the eloquence or pathos with 
which he states it, but on whether it is true or 
false ; on the pains he has taken to test its truth ; 
on his ability to make the fact of the case clear 
to other minds besides his own. 

In the revolution of religious thought which we 
have been going through in the last half -century, 
there has been a good deal among us of " truth in 
the making, " as distinct from truth ready-made, or, 
at least, taken for granted. This freedom of ours 
has had its inconvenience as well as its advantage, 
— the inconvenience, in particular, of regarding 
religious truth as truth of opinion merely, or of 
sentiment merely, and not as truth of fact; so that 
one is often tempted to cry out, as the lawyer did 
in court, " We don't want to know what you think 
about it : tell us what you know ! " 

The great and powerful churches, Catholic or 
Calvinist, have never made the mistake here hinted 
at. Their system of religious authority, or reli- 
gious terror, is built up on the assertion of facts, 
or what are meant to be taken as facts. The great 
strength of their appeal, or their claim to obedi- 
ence, has always rested on the matter-of-fact way 
in which the assertions of the creed are taken for 
granted. Even where the creed has been subli- 
mated into a mere semblance or ghost of dogma, 
"without body or bones," one is often struck with 
the great advantage its professors have, from their 
inherited habit of taking their foundations for 



WITNESS TO THE TRUTH. 195 

granted, and with it a business-like tone in their 
appeal, which too many of us have lost. But what 
a force this is when the creed means something 
real and substantial ! " Cock-sure ? of course I 
am!" I heard Mr. Spurgeon say once; "do you 
suppose I would say anything here that I did n't 
know ? " A few years ago, a very intelligent ob- 
server in the north of Ireland was drawn by curi- 
osity to hear a revivalist who was driving the 
neighbourhood frantic with religious terror. To 
his surprise, he found nothing at all of sensational 
appeal or impassioned declamation; but a quiet, 
business-like setting forth of the Divine judgments, 
which the speaker assumed that he knew all about, 
exactly in the tone in which a surgeon would ex- 
plain to his patient the necessity of a serious oper- 
ation which he had got to suffer. 

The task of the religious teacher is to testify 
what he has seen, and what his hands have han- 
dled of the Word of Life. Most likely he has 
no opinions on matters of theory that are worth 
much to anybody else, — apart from the main 
body of wholesome opinion generally admitted, — 
whatever be their value to himself. Yet, such as 
they are, they have cost him pains, and he is very 
apt to plume himself on the many things he thinks 
more than on the few things he has seen and 
known. "But what shall I do with my Coler- 
idge ? " asked a beginner, fresh from the theologi- 
cal school, of a wise, eloquent, and famous preacher. 
The answer was to the general effect that theories 
of the universe, or of the Divine Life, may well 



196 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

make the atmosphere of his religious thinking; 
but the real business of it is with those facts of 
daily life, the sight of which is common and open 
to all men. In a collection of Sermons, of some 
years back, I find the following passage, which I 
copy here to enforce what has been already said : 

One might well doubt and question with himself whether 
he is able to hold and declare the great faith of Eternity 
amidst the wrecks of Time ; at least, whether the truth 
he is able to retain as the outcome of all his questionings 
shall be also a Gospel, of power to save his own soul 
alive, and to afford an answer of strength and comfort to 
other hearts and lives besides his own : to do it, too, in 
simple honesty and sincerity with himself, knowing as he 
must the endless differences and uncertainties that hang 
upon every point of speculative opinion. My business 
here, then, must be to teach not what I think, but some 
few things I know. My opinions, such as they are, are 
not worth much, I think, to anybody but myself; and 
my speculations, such as they are, are worth still less. I 
should be ashamed to offer either of them as the message 
I am expected to bring. But the great Book of Life lies 
open before us all. In that book I have been a student 
for more than fifty years. And one must have been a 
sorry student, who should not have carried away some 
lessons that are no longer matters of opinion with him. 
Those lessons are some of them noble and inspiring; 
some, very grave and stern ; some, profound in their ap- 
plication to our pity or sorrow or fear. It is not a 
teacher's business to mince matters. He must take those 
lessons as the Lord of Life reads them out to him. He 
must declare the Law of Life as it is made known to him, 
— as it is, not as he thinks it ought to be. 



A NINETEENTH-CENTURY RELIGION. 

T READ lately a very charming account, from 
the pen of an affectionate disciple, that brought 
back to me many a pleasant memory of a form of 
faith — I might almost call it a new religion — 
which sprang up something more than fifty years 
ago in the bosom of a Christian community, which 
laid its powerful influence upon the mind and heart 
of two generations, which had its definite effect 
upon a circle of events of great public importance, 
which had its own sects and divisions of opinion 
within itself not hurting its deep sense of interior 
fellowship, and which has already, in the form it 
was known by, passed away, having done its work, 
with the state of things that gave it birth. 

As a separate body, with its profession of faith 
and form of observance, the sect it gave rise to no 
longer exists ; but in its time it had all that we 
could ask to make it a peculiar and in some ways 
a very beautiful and noble form of our common 
religion of humanity. It had its witnesses, its 
saints, its martyrs even, and its eloquent apostles. 
It had its convictions so sharply defined and so 
sacredly held that its disciples had no hesitation 
to separate themselves from any companionship, 
however near, from any religious home, however 
venerable, that did not accept their faith in all its 



198 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

austere purity. Its deep sense of fellowship was 
such as to merge all other distinctions of race, 
wealth, social position, culture (for it included 
the most ignorant along with the most refined), 
or sectarian belief, in a common brotherhood. Its 
self-sufficing courage was such as to reject without 
hesitation all half-way adhesion, that in the small- 
est degree compromised its one sacred article of 
belief. It had that sense of intimate communion 
away from and independent of all other ties, that 
the most solemn occasions of life, a rejoicing, a 
mourning, or a burial, could not be met as they 
ought without the company and words of its own 
lay preachers or advisers, who went long journeys 
to administer its words of comfort and its simple 
sacraments. Its creed interpreted the most seri- 
ous duties of life, and its radiant faith coloured 
every emotion of grief, wrath, love, or hope that 
possessed the souls of its adherents. 

What I have been trying to describe was the 
interior life of that remarkable body which has 
passed into history under the name American Ab- 
olitionists, partly as it was known to me in very 
near and affectionate relation with some of its 
saints and witnesses, but partly as it is brought 
back fresh in the charming narrative to which I 
have referred. It is hardly possible that the wider 
community indifferent or hostile to it at the time, 
or that a later generation to which its true tradition 
is grown already dim, should understand the full 
force of those qualities in it which made it what 
I have called " a new religion " in its day. 



A NINETEENTH-CENTURY RELIGION. 199 

And, again, what I have said of its interior life 
does not proceed from assent to the precision of its 
doctrine, or sharing in the line of action it pre- 
scribed. But I hold it to have been a great mis- 
fortune and loss to any one who was then old 
enough to understand, not to have caught through 
sympathy something of the sweet piety and nobil- 
ity of its better spirit. I cannot, as I write these 
words, think of any finer or nobler illustration of 
what we mean by the purest confessors of the great 
ages of faith than I recall of hours passed in in- 
timate companionship with some of those brave 
souls, — in particular that noble-hearted mother of 
sorrows,* Eliza Lee Follen, whose generous friend- 
ship continued through many a difference of opin- 
ion to the end of her life. No one can have had 
near knowledge of any such disciples of that school 
as are here spoken of, without being sure that they 
would have gone as freely to the stake or to the 
lions, rather than betray an instant's wavering of 
their faith, as any Christian witness of the Martyr 
Age. These memories are recorded here, to make 
as living and personal as possible what it was that 
made the life I speak of not only a powerful 
force at the heart of a great political crisis, but in 
the strictest sense a religious development, unique 
and peculiar, the outcome of the most vigorous 
piety and the intensest moral feeling, probably, 
known to that day. 

* This phrase is a suggestion of her portrait, painted by 
Gambardella in 1840, the first year of her widowhood. In fact, 
by native temperament and in disciplined character, she was as 
cheerful and buoyant as she was earnest and brave. 



200 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

I have tried to indicate what is so strikingly 
shown in Mrs. Wyman's narrative, — that com- 
pleteness of the interior life, adequate to every 
occasion or want that was consciously felt, which 
made this in some sense a religion by itself. The 
roots it grew from were nourished in the soil of 
many a Christian body whose juices they retained ; 
and it ripened fruit of many forms and flavours, 
as warmed or coloured in different religious cli- 
mates. But these differences were dominated or 
obscured by the one article of faith which the time 
seemed just then to make imperative. Its creed 
was of the shortest, — only a single article, and 
that a mere ethical axiom, with not a word of the- 
ory or a syllable that any one would care to dis- 
pute, — namely this: The Negro ought not to be 
enslaved. It was not the novelty of this truth, or 
its verity (which no one would contest), that made 
it the key-word of a new religion. It was simply 
that, in those particular minds, it became a live 
truth : the ethical maxim was transfigured to the 
sharp imperative, The Negro must not be enslaved. 
And, as every such truth is part of a living unity, 
it gathered to itself all those affiliations of affec- 
tion, courage, sympathy, resolution, hope, which 
left no sense of lack or defect in the hearts of those 
who accepted it. That one word, with what it in- 
volved to them, made it a sufficient bond of strength 
to all the conscious needs of a living heart and 
soul. 

One could not come in near contact with this 
spirit at its finest and purest, without feeling a 



A NINETEENTH-CENTURY RELIGION, 201 

certain remorse in case the critical understanding 
was unable to accept that simple creed, with its 
rigid authentic interpretation, as a sufficient solu- 
tion to the vast and perplexed political problem 
that was then upon us. To many of us it would 
have been so comforting, so delightful, if only we 
could have received the faith in that short and easy 
way! But, as with all creeds, the moment the 
critical understanding was left free to cross-ques- 
tion its real meaning and application, divisions of 
opinion must come about, even in that inner circle 
of professors who in the sharpest earlier struggles 
had presented a united front to every adversary. 
The most ardent faith cannot be held proof 
against the assaults of reason, and in the long run 
it will be reason that proves the stronger. 

But my purpose is not here to criticise that vivid 
demonstration of "ethics touched with enthusi- 
asm " — some men's definition of a true religion — 
to which in its purely religious aspect we have 
ourselves owed so much, and which made perhaps 
the most characteristic moral force of the last 
half-century. My purpose is rather to show, by 
an illustration or two, how naturally one point of 
intense moral conviction becomes a radiating point, 
like an electric arc-light, — imperceptible perhaps 
in dimension, but filling the whole nature with an 
ardent glow. In considering the possibilities of 
religion in the future, we must learn to detach our 
thought from all schemes of opinion, from all his- 
toric tradition, from staking anything upon the 
accuracy of any point of theory. What makes 



202 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

religion a vital power anywhere is the vivid con- 
ception of a Living Power in the soul, as revealed 
in some first-hand conviction of right and truth. 

In one shape or another, the religion of the future 
must be a religion of humanity, — a phrase much 
maligned because little understood. But what it 
may be, as a guiding and inspiring force, in some 
larger revelation of it hereafter, we may partly 
realize by recalling its quality and strength in that 
one most marked spiritual phenomenon of our own 
time. 



THE WORSHIP OF HUMANITY. 

TVTO one in his senses supposes that " worship " 
(in the sense we commonly give that 
phrase) is to be paid to the human race as such, 
whether in the abstract or in the concrete. If 
there were an equivalent in English for so plastic 
and broad a term as the French culte, the gro- 
tesque misrepresentation of it, so common, might 
have been spared. Unfortunately, the English 
"cult," which looks a good deal like it, is even 
more narrow and rigid in its accepted sense than 
" worship ; " and we must do the best we can with 
the materials we have. Culte, as I understand it, 
implies something of the emotion of " worship " and 
something of the formality of "cult." Probably 
we should understand it better, if its pliable Cath- 
olic antecedents were as familiar to us as the 
austere and lofty Protestant sense of " worship. " 
Certainly, it was possible to make nothing but 
a caricature of the whole matter by confounding 
the two. 

But, adopting the phrase under this protest, 
what does " the worship of humanity " really 
mean ? Now, nothing is sorrier than our usual 
attempts at definition ; and so, instead of giv- 
ing one, I will ask the reader to recall those 



204 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

lines in Longfellow's poem, " The Building of the 
Ship:" 

" Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State ! 
Sail on, O Union, strong and great ! " 

And so on, to the closing lines — 

" Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, 
Our faith, triumphant o'er our fears, 
Are all with thee, — are all with thee ! " 

Here is a vigorous poetic expression of a pure 
moral homage, an ardent intellectual idealization 
— of what ? The Union, represented officially, 
when those lines were written, by office-traders 
and slave-holders; the Union of the compromises 
and the Fugitive Slave Law; the same Union in 
which the same poet, a little while before, had 
written, speaking of its bondmen, — 

" What earthquake's arm of might 
Breaks his dungeon-gates at night V " 

This last citation is a keen protest against a sin- 
gle wrong. The other embodies what, for want of 
a better term, we may call the culte of the Ameri- 
can Union, — the passionate faith (as it proved) of 
millions of people; frankly and boldly, in spite 
of the coarser facts, idealizing an institution that 
included both that and a thousand other kindred 
wrongs. In a loose, large way, we call that popu- 
lar devotion to an idea by the name " worship ; " 
and Professor Seeley has shown us, in his " Natural 
Religion," how large a part of what is best in the 
religions of mankind has consisted in just such 
idealizing faiths. 



THE WORSHIP OF HUMANITY. 205 

Mr. Parton, in his admirable sketch of John 
Randolph, copies from Dr. Russell of the " Times " 
the story of a sick Confederate soldier, who gasped 
out, almost with his last breath, " Stranger, re- 
member, if I die, that I am Robert Tallon, of 
Tishimingo County, and that I died for States' 
Rights. See, now, they put that in the papers, 
won't you ? Robert Tallon died for States' 
Rights. " And he adds the comment, that " nearly 
all on one side of an imaginary line were willing 
to risk their lives for an idea which the inhabi- 
tants on the other side of the line not only did not 
entertain, but knew nothing about. " We say that 
the Southerners made States' Rights their reli- 
gion. And we say right. For the real object of 
a man's religious homage, the real object of his 
reverence and faith, is that for which (to translate 
Paul's phrase correctly) he "gladly dares even to 
die." That loyal faith, dim and blind, makes a 
far nobler conception of religion than the compla- 
cent indulgence in intellectual contemplation, or 
pious emotional fervour, with which some of us 
are apt to confound the term. 

But can Humanity be the object of as sincere a 
worship and of as willing sacrifice as the Ameri- 
can Union on one side, or States' Rights on the 
other, proved to be in the conflict of thirty years 
ago ? In attempting to answer this question, two 
or three things have to be borne in mind. On the 
one hand, this worship should not be confounded 
with the formal meditation, ritual, or apostrophe, 
by which members of the "Positivist Church" 



206 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

have braved the ridicule and obloquy of their re- 
ligious critics. To most of us at a distance, and, 
I confess, to me, these performances, as reported, 
seem a poor and cold imitation of the least attrac- 
tive portions of a sacerdotal Christianity. But 
then I never saw them, and do not know how spon- 
taneous and genuine they may possibly be. I dare 
say a description (especially an unfriendly one) of 
a prayer-meeting or a grove-meeting might be just 
as distasteful to me, if I had not actually been 
there, and known something of its genuineness, 
and caught its fervour. I am sure that a good 
many prayers we hear are nothing but apostrophes, 
more or less poetic; and the abstractions I have 
listened to, many a time, as they came from a 
Christian pulpit, were quite as empty as those re- 
ported of the Comtist " worship. " Only they were 
couched in a less unfamiliar dialect. 

Again, in our current fashions of speech, we 
strangely pervert and interchange such terms as 
" worship " and " service. " For this, we have 
good authority, — that, namely, which says, 
" Serve the Lord with gladness ; " and, presently 
after, "Worship the Lord in the beauty of holi- 
ness, " — both, apparently, referring to the same 
act, and that act being the temple ritual. But it 
is certainly taking great liberties, even under so 
excellent authority, when we identify " divine ser- 
vice " (as we often do) with singing a hymn or 
preaching a sermon or saying a prayer in public, 
or sitting in a pew to bear witness to these acts. 
It would be well, at any rate, to remember that 



THE WORSHIP OF HUMANITY. 207 

this curious confusion of terms has two sides to it ; 
and that, if the form of worship is so often desig- 
nated " service, " the form of service may also be 
the best reality of worship. 

So, to our question, " Can Humanity be an ob- 
ject of worship ? " we may very well reply, Cer- 
tainly: of service, at any rate; and thus, in an 
accepted sense, of worship too. But this, we feel, 
is a little evasive. We will put it, then: "Can 
Humanity be the object of moral homage or emo- 
tional veneration ? " To this we answer, Certainly 
not, — if we mean by it men as we find them ; any 
more than we revere the crude patent fact of a 
Union of States represented by office-traders and 
slave-holders. We must idealize the object first. 
This, as we have seen, is the process by which a 
poet or a patriot succeeds in getting an object of 
homage and devotion out of such unpromising ma- 
terials as were to be found in the United States of 
forty years ago. We might even say that we ideal- 
ize the more intensely, the more we are opposed 
by facts. We see the higher possibility in sharper 
relief. I am not sure that there was not a purer 
worship of the Union in its evil days of forty years 
ago than now in its wanton prosperity, pride, and 
strength. 

What moves my astonishment in some of the 
criticisms I have seen, is that the writers of them, 
out of pure unwillingness to see, should be totally 
blind to the cheap and common miracle that is 
wrought every day, among such humble devotees 
as Robert Tallon and the nameless millions who 



208 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

are every day glorifying the possibilities of our 
commonest humanity. I am all the more aston- 
ished that this should be the ordinary prejudice of 
religious minds in particular, which might be 
supposed to know, at least, the raw material mar- 
tyrs are made of. Of course, it is not the common 
mind, held in by ignorance, bigotry, prejudice, 
and hate, that can exhibit the worship of humanity 
in its purer and higher forms. It is only the ca- 
pacity of such worship, proving itself under all 
sorts of limitations and error, that one sees in aver- 
age cases. A very little acquaintance, one would 
think, with so much of history as we find in the 
Old and New Testaments, — still more, when our 
knowledge or our experience widens out, to take 
in the innumerable witnesses, high and low, to 
the capacity of service, the best one can render, 
without claim, hope, or dream of reward, — a very 
little knowledge (I say) of the religious life as it is 
should rebuke the poor and beggarly notion some 
men cling to, of what it is that ennobles and saves 
our poor human nature. 

My astonishment at the attitude so often chosen 
by the Christian mind is deepened by another 
thing. Christianity is set apart among the reli- 
gions of the world by making its object of worship 
a Divine Humanity. I have nothing to do here 
with the dogma, only with the symbol. As that 
symbol is generally interpreted now, at least in 
those forms of thought most familiar to us, " Christ " 
signifies not the historic individual, but the Di- 
vine Life indwelling in the soul of man, and mak- 



THE WORSHIP OP HUMANITY. 209 

ing the highest life of mankind at large. And, 
then, those who have made this magniloquent dec- 
laration turn about and studiously mock those 
others who have taken them at their word, and 
have found, or profess to have found, a real object 
of homage and service in Humanity itself, as the 
highest embodiment of Creative Power we can 
know anything about; nay, seek to confute this 
crude and blundering faith by dwelling on the 
meannesses, miseries, barbarisms, and crimes that 
disfigure human life as we find it. Alas ! if we 
could not idealize, love, serve, revere that which 
the critical eye finds full of imperfection, but 
which the heart clings to because it is bound up 
with our common humanity, we are no longer ca- 
pable of any religion at all, and there is no life 
left in us. 



14 



THE UNPARDONABLE SIN. 

rPHERE are doubtless many ways in which this 
sin may be committed. But of them all 
the most vulgar, as well as mischievous, is to de- 
clare that a prosperous scoundrel is more to be 
commended for success in life than a suffering 
hero or saint, unless their outward condition is 
somehow to be reversed in a future state of being ; 
and that the hero or saint, on that supposition, 
has made a great mistake in not choosing to be a 
scoundrel instead.* 

Perhaps the likeliest person to commit this par- 
ticular form of the " sin against the Holy Ghost " 
is one who makes a professional gain of godliness, 
so that at all events it shall be profitable for the 
life that now is, however it may be with the life 
to come. But I am very much amazed that re- 
ligious teachers, or teachers professing to be re- 
ligious, do not treat that declaration with the 
contempt and horror it deserves, — especially in a 
period of history in which, on the one hand, there 
is a very wide-spread scepticism as to the reality 
of any future life at all : else, why should the argu- 

* The comparison had actually been made, with this 
" immoral," between Saint Paul and the profligate Fouche by 
a prebendary of the Church of England. 



THE UNPARDONABLE SIN. 211 

ment for immortality be so incessantly repeated ? 
and when, on the other hand, there are crowds of 
irreligious men — nihilists, anarchists, revolution- 
ists of all sorts, as in Russia to-day — who stand 
ready at any instant to die for an idea, and who 
could not be bribed by any earthly prize to aban- 
don a creed which brings them only imprisonment, 
torture, and exile, under conditions to which 
Paul's daily martyrdom was comfortable and 
serene. 

The mystery of life and suffering is painful 
enough : our trust in some revelation hereafter, 
that will throw light on what is beyond our com- 
prehension or endurance, let us by all means hold 
fast to, as firmly as we can. But, for the sake of 
all the nobler possibilities of human character, 
let us practise, if we do not profess, something 
better than a creed of unrighteousness and a gospel 
of poltroonery ! 



THE DEATH OF JESUS. 

rPHE influence of the death of Jesus on his fol- 
lowers was more quick and profound than the 
influence of his life. Why it was so, they felt 
dimly and explained variously. Their explana- 
tions settled soon in the Jewish mind into the 
symbol of a Sacrifice, and in the Gentile mind 
into the symbol of a Ransom ; and in one or other 
of these symbols it has been chiefly adhered to, 
from that day to this. But we must go behind the 
symbol, if we would get at the fact. That fact we 
shall find no longer in the form of a " propitia- 
tion " of Divine wrath by the shedding of inno- 
cent blood, — that quaint, strange, and abhorrent 
dogma, which has so warped the Christian mind 
for centuries. We shall find it, better, by atten- 
tively considering the circumstances of the time, 
and the state of mind to which it spoke. 

What we call a " martyr " death — that is, death 
in " witness " of a truth ; death voluntarily suf- 
fered as the sacrifice for an idea — is something 
very familiar to our modern notion. We know 
just what a martyr death is, in the case of John 
Huss. We know just what we mean by a " martyr 
people," when we speak of the Huguenots, the 
Covenanters, or the Hollanders of the sixteenth 



THE DEATH OF JESUS. 213 

century. But the contemporaries of Jesus did not 
know. How little they knew, we see even in the 
splendid eleventh chapter of Hebrews, where such 
truculent popular heroes as Jephthah, Gideon, 
Barak, and Samson come in to fill out a list that 
shows us not one martyr for the faith, pure and 
simple, unless it be the allusion to the mother of 
seven children in the Maccabees. 

Two hundred years later, there was already a far 
more splendid and fast lengthening roll of Chris- 
tian martyrs in the most explicit sense : take the 
pure memory of Blandina and Perpetua for exam- 
ple ; and the world knew exactly what that partic- 
ular phase of moral heroism meant. Something 
had come over the spirit of antiquity, Jewish as 
well as Pagan, that took away the terror of death, 
and made torture easy to be borne. What was it ? 
Victory of the soul, of that sort, had been a Stoic 
dream. Read the Fifth Book of Cicero's " Tusculan 
Questions," and you find (so to speak) the drama 
of martyrdom for the truth rehearsed beforehand. 
But it was only a dream. How craven seems the 
spirit to which Paul himself makes appeal in his 
Epistle to the Romans ! " Scarcely for a righteous 
man will one die ; yet peradventure for a good man 
some would even dare to die. " The Greek {raya), 
to say nothing of the better sense, might tempt one 
to read, "would promptly dare to die." Those 
Romans would seem to have forgotten the devo- 
tion of Decius or the valour of the Tenth Legion 
in Gaul. Within ten years, under Nero's perse- 
cution, it was quite another thing. Martyrs came 



214 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

fast to the front then, and a martyr enthusiasm 
was born. 

What brought about the difference ? It is none 
too much to say that the difference was brought 
about by the high example of Calvary, and by those 
words associated with it : " Father, into thy hands 
I commend my spirit. " It is clear that the death 
of Jesus, voluntarily endured as it was, appealed 
in a singular way to the imagination, as well as to 
the faith, of his time. This had much to do with 
the fact that he went deliberately, with open eyes, 
in the assurance of a great cause for which he must 
testify, to meet an agonizing doom which he might 
easily have avoided. He refused to say the one 
word which Pilate almost entreated him to say, 
that would have set him free. 

Martyrs, in that sense, were not common in 
those days, as they afterwards came to be in the 
inspiration of that example. On the other hand, 
there had been abundance of speculative and elo- 
quent descanting on the nothingness of death and 
pain, and the glory of suffering for the truth. But 
nobody stood ready to put those fine theories into 
practice. There was suffering enough ; but it was 
impatiently and angrily borne, among the Jews as 
well as everywhere else. There were abundant 
traditions of heroic lives, and even of martyr 
deaths, among them of old. But these great glo- 
ries of the past seemed beyond the reach of a spec- 
ulative, restless, complaining generation. A spell, 
as it were, seemed to have passed upon the higher 
moral faculty ; and the best righteousness the age 



THE DEATH OP JESUS. 215 

could know was " the righteousness of the scribes 
and Pharisees." 

That spell was broken by the death of Jesus. 
Those great words are true, then, which say that 
there is verily something better than life, than 
this earthly life! — those words which had so long 
been spoken vainly, as in a dream. A man can 
enter into that higher life, and become indeed su- 
perior to the fear of death ! And so that act be- 
came, to those who could receive it, the revelation 
of another life than they had known before. The 
cross had "abolished death, and brought life and 
immortality to light. " It was the one thing then 
needed — like the death of the first man shot in 
battle — to break the spell of the old fear, and to 
strengthen ordinary men and tender women even 
to court and welcome, as they soon after did, any 
form of death or torture, that should be their wit- 
ness to the truth. 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN, 

rPHAT which is distinctively a religious view of 
life, not merely speculative and not merely 
scientific, always takes account of an element 
which we are agreed in common discourse to call 
"mystery." In one sense this recognition of mys- 
tery is the mental act, or experience, in which 
religion begins as a fact in human life, — "when 
a man finds himself, in whatever way, face to face 
with the Eternal." But this is not to be taken in 
any narrow sense, as if it meant only that super- 
natural realm of Being which, interpret it how we 
will, embraces and enfolds all life like an atmo- 
sphere. Its expression is not merely in the doc- 
trines or the symbols which speak to us of the 
transcendent truths of the Divine Life, the Infinite 
Holiness, the Eternal Destiny that make the re- 
ligious view of things looked at away from our- 
selves. It is found, just as much, in the plain 
common solitary experience of life as we share it, 
needing only the observation or analysis of an open 
eye to discern it ; just as to a fine ear there is a 
subtilty in the harmonies of music which we can- 
not account for by any mathematical measurement 
of the pulses of sound. When once it is recog- 
nized, we know what is meant by the religious 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 217 

interpretation of life; and see how little this is 
accounted for by any analysis that would merge it 
in utilitarian ethics, or emotional piety, or prac- 
tical benevolence, or a cultivated understanding. 

The simplest of all forms of such religious inter- 
pretation is doubtless mere submission to the in- 
evitable. And in this act of submission there is a 
sort of comfort, — as if the human heart, in its in- 
stinctive loyalty, accepted it as true that "what- 
ever is is right." It was to be were the pathetic 
words in which a poor woman, in my hearing, ap- 
peared first to find solace in a crippling accident. 
But the real religious lesson of pain and sorrow is 
far deeper than that. " Behold, we count them 
happy which endure,'' says the most practical- 
minded of the apostles ; and of the consolations of 
human sympathy it has been remarked : " that they 
alleviate exquisite pain is something; that they 
transmute the pain which must be borne and is 
borne into a healing and beneficial agency is 
more." It speaks more profoundly of the Divine 
meaning of our life than the common arguments of 
our religious optimism. Thus one writer finds an 
evidence that life is good in this : " If we are our- 
selves in good health, and will think of it, we find 
that there is not a single bodily function, from 
taking food into our lips to the violent energy of a 
foot-race or the rapture of sensation in a glorious 
landscape, but is a special and particular source 
of pleasure : just that delight, no doubt, an infant 
finds in winking its eyes and brandishing its hand ; 
and just that delight, as in the luxury of dropping 



218 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

off to sleep, the dying feel, as their conscious sen- 
sation lapses into eternal rest." But what shall 
we say of the opposite of this condition, where the 
conscious sensation is only agony and grief ? 

One recalls here the desperate picture which 
Milton draws, from descriptions of the "lazar- 
house " of earlier times, where it seems as if no 
alleviation of mercy or hope could possibly be 
thought of. But a more merciful age not only has 
learned faith in such possible alleviation, but has 
made the way of it open to many and many a suf- 
ferer. Even the actual relief of misery is an infe- 
rior boon to that revelation of "the law of the 
spirit of life " which it begins to make discernible. 
Take, in contrast to those unrelieved sights and 
sounds of woe in "Paradise Lost," the following 
account which Mrs. Oliphant gives,* under the 
comforting title "House of Peace," of a visit to a 
great hospital of incurables near London : — 

I have gone through the greater part of those rooms, 
filled with indescribable aches and sufferings that are 
without hope, and I have found nothing but a patient 
quietness, a great tranquillity, a peace which fills the care- 
less spectator — coming in out of the fresh air, out of the 
sunshiny world, where everything is rejoicing in life and 
strength and the radiance of the morning — with awe and 
respectful reverence. Some of these poor people are never 
free from pain ; some are subject to periodical paroxysms 
of anguish, cannot move at all, even by the nurse's aid. 
And yet there is Peace breathing all round us. Not only 
no complaint, but a composed and mild endurance, often 

* Copied from the " Spectator " of February 15, 1890. 



THE MYSTERY OF PAIN. 219 

accompanied with smiles, scarcely ever with a countenance 
of gloom. Ah atmosphere of cheerfulness fills, like sun- 
shine, the quiet chambers. What struggles there may be 
in lonely hearts or tortured bodies, it is not ours to in- 
quire. Such struggles there must be, or the sufferers 
would be more than human. But we can see nothing but 
patience and peace. Our hearts cry out for them as we 
pass from one bed of anguish to another, but from these 
beds there rise no cries. All is tranquillity, patience, a 
great quietness : the Palace of Pain is also the House of 
Peace. 

" It would almost seem, " is the comment upon 
those words, " as if the withdrawal of all hope tended, 
in the beneficent ways of Providence, to quiet af- 
flicted nature, and to bring about a composure and 
calm of soul, which is proof against many keen 
temptations. " Not, of course, in all, but in " them 
for whom it is prepared." In many of those who 
receive it so it is, no doubt, the reflex of a very 
positive belief in an everlasting life of conscious 
and increasing joy, to which they may enter only 
through the gateway of pain ; but in many others 
it seems to be the simple, natural effect of that 
discipline of "strength and purification" which is 
the profounder meaning of pain, so that they are 
already, without knowing it, entered into the eter- 
nal life, — nay, as in some cases known to us, have 
felt a certain exaltation of spirit in the conscious 
sense that they have been thus singled out by the 
Lord of Life, as those worthy, like their Master, 
to be made " perfect through suffering. " 



AT SIXTY: A NEW-YEAR LETTER. 

rPHE following was written in reply to a grave 
and despondent, almost despairing, statement 
by a friend, of the way in which the life-problems of 
religion had come home to him. The writer and 
the receiver of the letter were each just turned of 
sixty : — 

I am deeply obliged to you for your long and very 
touching letter which I have just received, and cannot do 
better with the rest of my new-year's morning than to 
give you such an answer as I may have it in my mind 
to write. 

It is a serious thing, as you hint, that the years are 
rolling over our heads so fast, and that others will begin 
to call us old, whether we feel ourselves to be so or not, 
and that meanwhile we seem no step nearer the sort of 
solution we hoped for once, to the questions we entered 
on together forty years ago. On the other hand, there 
is something very peaceful and comforting to me in this 
same thing. A good many have gone before, including 
my own father and mother, whom I had known in the 
fulness of their life, when they were twenty years younger 
than I am now, whom I have seen pass away in perfect 
peace ; and I know that probably within twenty years it 
will be so with me. The thought of it does not disturb 
me in the least. It leaves room only for this : that I 
must do the work of Him that sent me while it is day, 
for the night cometh, when no man can work. 



AT SIXTY: A NEW-YEAR LETTER. 221 

I have perhaps too little patience with some men's 
sentimental reaction towards orthodoxy ; because in the 
broad sweep of opinion this seems to me very clearly a 
temporary makeshift, which would leave a man all the 
worse after it, like waking from an opium dream. The 
fact is, the state of mind of the believer in the " ages of 
faith " was — always excepting the peace of holiness he 
may have attained — what no one of us would consent for 
a moment, even if it were possible, to accept in exchange 
for what the frankest and simplest materialism leaves us. 
At best, it was the chance of a paradise, with the im- 
measurable background of hell, — a prospect which no 
decent man would accept as comfort, however he might 
be forced to assent to it as dogma; far less than he would 
desire a pleasant park of his own, on condition that all 
London should undergo for five years the horrors of siege 
and assault. 

Accordingly, I do not look back with the least longing 
or desire to any form of a more dogmatic or positive faith 
that has been held in past times. I simply admire and 
honour the moral qualities of fidelity, courage, tenderness, 
and the rest, with which it has been held. As to myself, 
and my own place in the universe, I am not in the least 
disturbed by anything that materialism can say, even if 
all its negations were accepted as proved. I have no 
anxious desire to live an hour longer than the system I 
live in has prescribed ; and, so far as I am aware, should 
accept either side of the alternative with equal acquies- 
cence: infinite duration, or instant blotting out of con- 
sciousness. I do not know why either of them (which I 
must share with all who have ever lived) should disturb 
me. If the glory of the first, it is so much, which I nei- 
ther have deserved nor can apprehend, added to the im- 
mense privilege and opportunity I already find in living. 



222 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

Why should I be troubled that I cannot solve a problem, 

of which no man has yet approached the solution, and 
which, in twenty years or twenty-five at most, will no 
longer be a problem to me ? The best thing I can possi- 
bly look for in the interval is to be in some degree worthy 
of the hope. 

So far. then, as concerns my own life and place in the 
universe, the question is very simple, and gives me no 
anxiety whatever. Of course, I feel that, like Dives, I 
have had many good things in this lifetime, and that, in 
comparison, the great majority have had many evil things. 
Still, strictly speaking, that touches me only so far as I 
am personally responsible for what I do or fail to do, — 
which makes the sphere of ethics, that is, of religion and 
morals, as I understand them. "Whether the lot of that 
majority is better or worse than no life at all, I am not 
in the least competent to say. To say it is better, is to 
meet favourably the only question that can be fairly raised. 
To say it is worse, is to accuse either the Omnipotent and 
All-wise, which would be blasphemy and absurd; or else 
to accuse an impersonal System of things, to whose laws 
we have nothing to do but submit, — and that, if not blas- 
phemous, is even more absurd. To say. on the other 
hand, that we can make life a hair's-breadth better or 
worse for anything that lives, is to put quite a new mean- 
ing upon it, and to open up all the possibilities of human 
character and condition : that is, the whole sphere of 
practical religion. 

This, you see. is putting the whole thing on the very 
lowest ground, — not a ground on which, any more than 
you, I am content to stay by denial of anything that may 
be beyond. Still, I think it is a good thing, now and 
then, to accept that situation provisionally, and see what 
we can make of it. It is a good place to start from, at 



AT SIXTY : A NEW- YEAR LETTER. 223 

any rate, however unsatisfactory it may be to rest in. 
Least of all should a man despair, and reproach or afflict 
himself, because for the present he sees nothing beyond. 
If there is anything, he will see it as soon as he is capable 
— by death, if not before. If not, he has still less occa- 
sion of self-reproach for not seeing what is not. He ought, 
then, in decent self-respect, to take a position at least as 
good as a pagan Stoic's : it is a pity if, after all these 
years, he cannot do something to improve upon that. 

I should say, besides, that he should keep his mind 
open, and not shut, to all hints of the possibility of 
higher ranges of truth. And, then, that he should do all 
he can to enter, by sympathetic study and understanding 
of that spirit, into the larger and higher life of Humanity, 
as it has been lived by those who have done most honour 
to human nature and most good according to their 
opportunity. 

And, for another thing, it means to keep in relations of 
as deep and true sympathy as possible with other lives near 
our own. I cannot, any more than you, solve these ques- 
tions by speculation and argument. Very rarely indeed, 
if ever, when I have had to face them in the way of pro- 
fessional duty or personal experience, has the ground 
failed me. 



THE QUESTION OF A FUTURE LIFE. 

A LONG with decay of the old ecclesiasticism, 
many have felt their hold giving way upon 
faith in a future immortal life. It appears to me 
not wise to disguise from ourselves the gravity 
and extent of this change. It is brought home to 
us in two ways. On one hand, it is no longer pos- 
sible to appeal with any confidence as proof to the 
resurrection of Jesus, because that is the very fact 
of history most open to dispute — to say nothing of 
multitudes of eager believers in immortality who 
would be only affronted and perplexed by being 
asked to stake it on an event like that, or the mil- 
lions outside the Christian world to whom it is 
pure fable. On the other hand, as the terms of 
the question come to be better understood, there 
results a state of mind which feels that no testi- 
mony and no argument can cover the whole ground. 
To such a state of mind reason and imagination 
are alike dumb and helpless, when once it is ad- 
mitted to be an open question. 

In reality, it is not one question only, but three : 
If a man die shall he live again ? if he live again 
shall he live forever V if he live again and forever, 
shall he live with his present thoughts and mem- 
ory, bearing still in his soul the impression of this 



THE QUESTION OF A FUTURE LIFE. 225 

transitory life ? It is easy for the mind to repose 
in a belief which it never questions. It is easy to 
look forward if not with confidence yet with hope 
— with intellectual calmness at any rate — to the 
possibilities of being that may unfold themselves 
hereafter. But it is not only difficult, it is (I 
think) clearly and even necessarily impossible, 
to obtain anything like intellectual certitude by 
such process of argument as has commonly been 
attempted. The best our reasoning can do is to 
legitimate the belief when we already have it. 

Let me state the point, if I can, with absolute 
candour and plainness. I do not at all undervalue 
the assurance which many persons undoubtingly 
profess. I do not think that any conceivable 
worldly gain, or prospect of success, or delight, or 
suffering, could weigh for a moment in comparison 
with the positive certainty of endless existence, 
including the judgments and compensations it 
must bring with it. Indeed, it seems ridiculous 
even to hint the terms of such comparison. But 
have I any reason to suppose that I can by any 
process of reasoning establish that certainty ? I 
learn in history that the best minds of all ages, 
from Plato down, have spent themselves upon that 
matter, with results absurdly futile and vain if 
we compare the thing attempted with the thing 
achieved. I learn, again, that many generations 
have lived in undoubting belief of immortality 
through the Christian revelation — sometimes in 
abject terror at its judgments, sometimes in ec- 
static hope of its celestial glories. I learn, still 

15 



226 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

further, that the genuineness of that revelation, or 
its meaning, opens that one question about which 
the learning, the critical science, and the honest 
judgment of our day are most hopelessly divided. 

Such is the net result, the summing up, of near 
three thousand years of disputation. Now I have 
already lived for seventy years, and I cannot at 
best look forward to so much as twenty more. At 
twenty, as I can look back and well remember, I 
had a strong, intense, passionate desire to know 
the truth behind the veil. To that desire I may 
probably owe more that has gone for good into my 
own mental life than to any other single thing. 
But to my eye, at least, that veil has not yet been 
lifted. It is even thicker now than it seemed those 
fifty years ago. It appears to me that I can make 
a better use of my remaining time, than to devote 
my powers, such as they are, to attempting what 
no man has done yet in these three thousand years, 
— that is, a grasp of rational assurance in this mat- 
ter, to satisfy myself or others. There is a great 
deal for me to learn yet in the present life, and I 
trust something for me gratefully to enjoy : some- 
thing, no doubt, to suffer. At any rate, there is a 
great deal for me to do of a different sort, which I 
honestly think I can do, as I honestly think I can- 
not that. So I will not question and torment 
myself in vain; but wait and hope. 

This, I think, is a right and legitimate state of 
mind. It is confirmed in me by what I see around 
me. I should have been afraid, once, to imagine 
how many I have since known, who have come, 



THE QUESTION OF A FUTURE LIFE. 227 

gravely, sadly perhaps, but at length quite content- 
edly, to the same result. In some cases it has 
been with conflict and bitterness, after a hard, 
joyless, unprosperous, painful experience of life. 
In such cases I have deeply lamented that some 
way could not have been open, by religious sym- 
pathies and fellowship, to unseal the fountain of 
sweeter and happier emotion. Such sealed-up ca- 
pabilities, such baffled and broken struggles, are 
perhaps, after all, our best indications of another 
life — such as they are ; far better, certainly, than 
logical demonstrations, or the rapturous assurances 
that almost invite a reaction into unbelief. 

Now to such persons, in their actual state of 
mind, it would be wholly out of the question to 
accept the common argument for a future unend- 
ing life. In fact, they have no desire to look 
forward to it. The mere thought of continued 
existence has become a burden. Again and again, 
such persons have said to me that they craved and 
looked forward to nothing else than the repose of 
sleep and utter forgetfulness. Rest from toil, 
ease from pain, oblivion from the torment of 
haunting memory, — this negative bliss was the 
only boon they longed for. Any form of conscious 
life or activity — to endure even for another period 
so long as they have lived already — it would be 
mere weariness and pain to anticipate : the blank 
anticipation of an eternity of contemplation and 
repose (which is what it means to many) would be 
a prospect of unspeakable dismay. What can I 
say to these so widelv different moods of mind ? 



228 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

What can I say to one class of minds, that would 
not seem to mock the hope or else to increase the 
burden of the other class ? 

This I think I can say, in the first place, with 
absolute confidence: that I am very much more 
sure that the law of my being is ordered rightly, 
than that it is ordered in any particular way. I 
do not know in the least whether unending exist- 
ence would be best for me, constituted as I am; 
but I am perfectly sure that if it is best for me, 
constituted as I am, — which is the same as say- 
ing that it is in harmony with the laws of my be- 
ing, — then it will be my destiny. I do not see 
that we need have the least anxiety to know more 
than this. To know as much as this — in the only 
sense in which we can be said to have knowledge 
of such things — is not a matter for scientific 
proof. It is simply an experience, an attainment, 
of the religious life. It is simply the fact of what 
in the language of religion is called our reconcilia- 
tion with the will of God: that is, to accept in- 
telligently the law of our existence. If any one 
craves and seeks a clearer certainty than this, then I 
say that his only likelihood to get it is not by any 
process of intellectual argument, but by cultivat- 
ing the emotions and the forms of religious sympa- 
thy that lead that way. 

One thing more I might say to such a one : that 
this great hope of humanity, if it cannot be proved, 
so on the other hand cannot be disproved, and 
should not be denied. The miracle of life is sa 
prodigious, that it seems of itself to invite the 



THE QUESTION OP A FUTURE LIFE. 229 

mind into that larger hope. In some conditions 
of life — in bereavement, disappointment, or hope- 
less suffering — I should say that one might do 
well to devote his best thought and endeavour to 
cultivate that mood of mind, to attain (if it may 
be) that faculty of celestial vision which always 
sees the heavens open and angels of God ascend- 
ing and descending between us and him. To others, 
again, I should say rather: "Keep that hope in 
your heart as a treasure in reserve; do not deny it 
or cast it away, for the day may come when you 
would give all you are worth to bring back only a 
little gleam of it." 

But I should also say: "Do not let any doubt 
that may rest upon it be an excuse for debasing 
or forfeiting your belief in what is high, pure, no- 
ble, generous in life. Above all, do not consent 
to that whining and craven tone indulged in by 
many religionists, which professes to find nothing 
to enjoy, nothing to be glad of, nothing to be 
grateful for, in this life, unless the Author of it 
shall add to it an infinity more of the same sort, 
or better. This last degradation, this most con- 
temptible form of impious ingratitude in the guise 
of piety, — at least clear your soul of this. There 
is much to do in life — a task worthy and noble for 
the humblest of us. There is much to enjoy, some- 
thing to suffer, for us all. Make this life true; 
and it shall be well with you whether for this life 
only, or for life everlasting. For the times and 
the seasons the Lord of Life " hath kept hidden in 
his hand. " 



HOPE, AS AN ANCHOR 

TT is the nature of hope, and the occasion of 
it, to lay hold on some definite thing, some- 
thing fixed and certain, and use it as a working 
force, — as a motive of action ; as a stay to resolu- 
tion; as a rest to the lever with which the soul 
must bear against the world and hold up the sorrow- 
ful weight of it. And always its strength and its 
hold are in something which is out of sight ; which 
is, as it were, the firm bottom in a tossing sea. 
No discovery of science will ever bring within our 
vision the ground on which it ultimately rests. 
No process of logic, no reach of learning, will ever 
serve to make into knowledge what from its very 
nature is only faith. Not merely that one who 
has it can perhaps justify it to no other mind but 
his own. Most likely it will be quite as hard to 
justify it to his own mind. But it is just as cer- 
tain there — just as much the strength of his arm 
and the inspiration of his heart — as the far-off 
suns and fields of the tropics, which win the wild 
geese and swallows in their autumn flight, because 
in their simple heart that instinct, pointing to 
warmer latitudes, is fixed as law and strong as 
destiny. " For God hath made them so. " 

The strength of hope is found in the habit of act- 
ing by what is fixed and certain now, so as to learn 



231 

to trust it, — as much as the mariner trusts the 
safe mooring when his ship is actually fastened to 
the shore ; as much as the farmer trusts the har- 
vest when the yellow ears already break the husks, 
basking in sunshine and the October air. This is 
exactly against the habit we are sometimes ad- 
vised to — of trusting nothing but what can be 
proved true and certain. If we wait for that, we 
condemn ourselves to a vain and barren dream. 
Certainty in Science, which deals with things that 
our eyes can see and our hands can handle, must 
come through doubt, experiment, and proof. But 
the processes of Faith, which deals with ultimate 
realities that come home to the conscience and 
heart, are exactly contrary to those of science. 
Faith must get its fundamental truths by experi- 
ence and insight : there is never any proving them. 
Faith belongs to the things of Life ; and certainty 
in things of life comes hot from reasoning about 
them but from living them. The end of life, said 
Goethe, is an action and not a thought. 

It is weakness not strength, it is scepticism not 
faith, that comes from waiting before we act till 
the difficulties are all cleared away. The diffi- 
culties will vanish, step by step, only as we ap- 
approach them. The battle of life, as most of us 
have to fight it, is a sort of campaign in the 
Wilderness. We can only see our enemies when 
we are close upon them. We can only meet them 
by going into the wilderness where they are. We 
can only beat them, often, by outflanking them, 
— that is, by getting deeper into the wilderness 



232 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

than they are, and so beyond them. Now hope 
comes from the habit of acting by what is fixed 
and certain now — ever so little ; even from acting 
by what only seems fixed and. certain. If the seed 
is no bigger than a mustard seed, it may yet grow 
till it becomes a tree, and birds of the air come 
and lodge in the branches of it. " We are saved 
by hope, " says Paul ; " but hope that is seen, " he 
adds, "is not hope; for what a man seeth, why 
doth he yet hope for ? " 

And this is the way, too, of immortal hope as 
the solace and cheer of this mortal life. It is 
no cant, no vanity, to say that we all need 
whatever strength we can get from it. We need 
it all. We need it, all of us. For no doubt the 
days of darkness will come to us all ; the days of 
declining strength, of gathering age, of weary 
pain. And, for such a time, we need that light, 
that strength, that star, that " anchor of the soul 
sure and steadfast, entering into what is within 
the veil. " Now I do not suppose many of us are 
likely to have it in the rapturous and eager way 
we sometimes read of in religious biographies, and 
are apt to associate, perhaps, with the natural 
close of a Christian life. It is a blessed thing 
when it is so. It is a kind of revelation of what 
we might not see without that help. It is like the 
vision of an artist's eye, which shows us a beauty 
and a glory in the world about us, which we should 
never have known but for that unsealing of our own 
faculty of sight. 

But this is a matter of temperament, — an 



HOPE, AS AN ANCHOR. 233 

affair, so to speak, of special grace. What we 
have a right to look for, and a trust to win, is a 
grave, steady, and quiet hope, — "a hope like an 
Anchor, " solid, strong, secure among deep and 
eternal things. And I think it is most likely to 
be had, when we have dismissed all vain question- 
ing and anxiety about the destiny of our own soul. 
God will take care of that. That, we may safely 
enough leave with Him who made it. If he loves 
it and cares for it, what fear have we ? If He 
does not love it or care for it, — or if we thought 
so, — what hope have we ? It is not on special 
favours to ourselves we rest; but on unchanging, 
wise, eternal Law — law which we know, as Paul 
says again, to be " holy, just, and good. " 

And this grave, manly hope, this patient wait- 
ing for what shall be revealed hereafter, this sur- 
render, with no vain anxieties and alarms, to the 
True, the Merciful, and the Just, — this we shall 
be likely to gain in proportion as we quit thought 
about ourselves, and put our hand honestly to our 
appointed work, with as little thought for our- 
selves as a mother who tends a sick child. It is 
not for her own sake she tends the child : it is for 
the child's sake. Nay, the more completely she 
forgets herself, and thinks only of the child, the 
more sure she is of the reward of her faithful care. 
It is so that our strength and our peace will come. 
" It is good, " said the prophet, " that a man both 
hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the 
Lord." 



THE DIVINE JUDGMENT. 

TT is worth observing that the apostle Paul, in 
all he says of sin and its penalties, hardly 
ever — perhaps not once — speaks of retribution in 
the future life. Of guilt, or evil in the soul, he 
has a very strong and constant sense. His own 
conscience had been stung very sorely (as we may 
suppose) in thinking of his violent and unjust per- 
secution of the disciples before his conversion, es- 
pecially his share in the martyr death of Stephen, 
which seems to have haunted him ever after. 
Guilt is to him — as it must be to any one who 
realizes what it is — the worst calamity that can 
befall a man. Salvation from it is the one great 
and precious gift that Christ has brought. But of 
its penalty, as a thing apart, Paul says almost 
nothing. The divine judgment, as he puts it, is 
all contained in the law of growth. Leave what 
you will, good or bad, to work out its natural re- 
sults, and you have the strictest as well as the 
justest retribution that the Divine law could im- 
pose. What we, too, really want to see in all 
such things, is not the separation but the identity. 
We do not pretend to know what is beyond the 
veil of death, but we may try to understand what 
we can, by watching the course of things that de- 



THE DIVINE JUDGMENT. 235 

termine our condition now. The most tremendous 
sentence ever spoken, as well as the most uner- 
ringly just, is that we find in the last chapter of 
the New Testament : " He that is unjust — let him 
be unjust still ; and he that is filthy — let him be 
filthy still ; and he that is righteous — let him be 
holy still. " No man can afford to mock, and no 
man can possibly defy, such a sentence as that. 

And now, a word upon a view of the matter 
which has been far more common. No man, 
knowing what the words mean, — no man, that is, 
fit to receive salvation, — would consent of his 
own will to accept his own rescue at the cost of 
hopeless misery to any human creature. I cannot 
think what some people mean, when they pretend 
to thank God for their own particular salvation 
from a doom which multitudes are falling into 
every day. As if unending life were a desirable 
thing in itself — so desirable, that we must be 
grateful for enjoying it at that horrible price ! I 
do not say it cannot be so ; I do not say it is not 
so. I only say that to any decent man endless 
felicity for him, with an endless hell for anybody 
annexed, would be no comfort at all, but a very 
frightful thing to look forward to. Besides, it is 
nonsense to our better reason. Salvation is the 
fruit of holiness ; and holiness must be one's free 
and constant choice. We know nothing about a 
blessedness that can be put upon a man from out- 
side, like clothes or riches. It would only be ty- 
ing apples on a twig, or roses on a bush: they 
make no part of the life ; they only cover up the 



236 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

life. What a man wants is not felicity, but oppor- 
tunity. As long as he chooses evil he will have it 
— till it grows into him, and becomes a part of 
him, and the worst thing that can happen to him. 
What we may hope, as to that other higher life, 
is that its drift, its tendency, to good may be 
stronger and steadier than we find it here. I have 
not the least idea that it will (as some people seem 
to suppose) make saints and angels of us all, all 
at once. I, for one, should be very sorry if it 
did. I do not want to be an angel. I had rather 
be a man as the Lord made me, with the faults 
and virtues of a man, — though the faults may be 
very many, and the virtues very few. I like to 
feel, always, that there is a chance of something 
better ; and this means that there is room for im- 
provement, and something to improve. How it is 
about the splendid or the terrifying imagery of 
the Bible about these things, I do not pretend to 
know. But I observe that the Bible speaks to us 
by the voice and imagination of men who felt very 
keenly the conflict of right and wrong, and went 
into it very heartily. I wish to stand by their 
side. Not before the throne, waving palms for a 
victory that is theirs, not mine. But by their 
side in the battle of life ; that I may at least strike 
one good stroke before I die, to help in the final 
victory. I, for one, had rather be growing fit to 
stand with them before the throne, than to be al- 
ready there ! 



PARDON. 

rPHE consequences of an act are physical, and 
go by natural laws. What we call the sin 
of an act is a moral condition, subject to moral or 
spiritual law. These laws always leave the way 
open for expiation, atonement, pardon: which all 
mean at bottom the same thing — that is, that one 
shall overcome it, outgrow it, get the better of it 
in his own heart and life. There are laws and 
conditions that help him in this; and these are 
what we appeal to in dealing with sin religiously. 

But first let us look back for a moment to the 
consequences. These, too, to some extent, we can 
control and overcome — not by imploring an act of 
forgiveness from above; but by practising simple 
fidelity here below. There are remedies and re- 
liefs — as when we try to heal our child of a sick- 
ness or accident it has fallen into by our neglect. 
This very care and pains of ours may work by spir- 
itual as well as natural law — by creating a ten- 
derer and dearer relation between parent and child 
than there would have been if the child had not 
suffered that wrong. Nothing in all the world is 
more deeply touching than what we may some- 
times see — the love of a little child, crippled or 
blinded, perhaps, by some neglect for which the 



238 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

parents can never forgive themselves; while the 
child loves them all the dearer, unknowing of 
the deep pain which is the well-spring of that 
tender and devoted care. The parents' love has 
in it something of remorse : the child's love has 
in it something of the sweetness of an act of par- 
don. But shall we say the child pardons the fault 
it does not know ? 

Now what can we possibly mean, when we ask 
to be forgiven as ive forgive the debts that are ow- 
ing to ourselves ? An honest man does not wish 
to escape the payment of his debts. As long as 
his means hold out, and he can do it without posi- 
tive cruelty to his family, he chooses that all he 
can earn and all he can spare shall go to the pay- 
ment of them. He will not even accept the for- 
giveness of them, though the law fully justifies 
and even offers it. An honourable merchant, who 
has failed and afterwards made a fortune, will not 
hold himself released from the old obligation : his 
sense of business honour will force him to make 
full payment when he can, principal and interest. 
That is a style of conduct which we sometimes see 
in men of the world. It ought to shame those re- 
ligionists, who talk to men as if the one great aim 
of religion were to escape the just consequences of 
their acts, and shirk their debts by getting some 
one else to pay for them. On the contrary, what 
true religion does for a man is to make him hon- 
est enough and strong enough to look those con- 
sequences in the face, and take them without 
complaint, whatever is his honest share of them. 



PARDON. 239 

If he accepts a meaner principle, the mischief 
does not stop with him. That feeling itself which 
makes the life of conscience is deadened. That 
wholesome judgment which holds every man to 
the consequences of his acts is debauched and 
bribed. The very foundations themselves of civil 
society are undermined when the motive of private 
virtue is diminished : we have done what we could 
to make human life itself false, hollow, and 
corrupt. 

Now precisely what true morality is in our rela- 
tion to men and the laws of social life, that true 
religion is in our relation to God and the laws of 
the spiritual life. Let us look at it in the same 
manly fashion. In one case, as much as in the 
other, we do not ask to escape our obligations ; or 
to escape the consequences of not meeting our ob- 
ligations. If a man really cares for anything — 
his farm, his learning, his profession, his discov- 
eries — he wants to do not as little as he can: he 
wants to do as much as he can. His aim is to do 
a man's full work in the world, according to his 
means and ability. And again : no man who does 
try, and who makes mistakes and faults, wants the 
wheels of the universe stopped, or set going the 
other way, to relieve him of the consequences of 
his misdoing. Any such concession to his moral 
weakness, he clearly sees, would be to increase 
the weakness and aggravate the harm. It is a 
law of life and hope we want, not a law of dis- 
couragement and death. The great gains in hu- 
man power have almost always come from the 



240 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

resolute effort to overcome some weakness, or make 
good some mistake, or supply some lack. 

Mature life is rich with the fruit of such vic- 
tories : as wood that is grown on an exposed moun- 
tain-side has its grain enriched and made precious 
by the storms it has wrestled with, by the bruises 
and scars it has outgrown, by the wrenches and 
twists that warped its fibre, while it was strug- 
gling through the exposures of its earlier growth. 
Every ripe and noble character, if it should sud- 
denly be made transparent, would show the marks 
of similar bruises and scars; and we should see 
that what we took for a native grace is really the 
fruit of a moral victory. Our talk about debt and 
credit in our account with the Eternal is only a 
figure of rhetoric. It means the service we owe 
in a good life — a debt from which there is no dis- 
charge ; or else the consequence of negligence in 
that duty, from which there is no escape. And 
when we speak of the forgiving that debt we speak 
in a figure or symbol : what we mean is the fruit 
of true penitence or faithful effort — that joy and 
peace which are in the soul of him " whose trans- 
gression is forgiven and whose sin is covered," as 
wrenches and strains are covered by a new growth 
of fibre; as bruises and scars are covered by the 
growth of sound flesh : and this is a very genuine 
and a constant experience in the religious life. 



STEPPING-STONES. 

rPHE profoundest poem in our language, — or 
perhaps in any language, — regarded as a 
piece of spiritual history and experience, begins 
with these lines: — 

" I held it truth, with him who sings 
To one clear harp in divers tones, 
That men may rise on stepping-stones 
Of their dead selves to higher things." 

Now what are these " stepping-stones of their dead 
selves " ? In general, we may say, they are any 
part of our life, or experience, which lies back of 
us in the past, and so is, in a sense, dead to the 
present ; as we say, " Let the dead past bury its 
dead." All our past experience may be, and 
ought to be, a series of steps, carrying us up 
higher. This is the " ladder of Saint Augustine, " 

where 

" All common things, each day's events 
That with the hour begin and end, 
Our pleasures and our discontents, 

Are rounds, by which we may ascend." 

But, in particular, that phrase means any shock, 
any trial, any suffering, any wrong, which we have 
once succeeded in overcoming and putting under 
our feet We were on a level with it once, or per- 
haps below its level. It came to us as a burden. 
It rested on us as a burden. If we chose to keep 

16 



242 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

it hanging to us so, — if we did not choose the 
effort of grappling with it and getting the better of 
it, — then it remained as a clog, a burden, a bitter 
and weary weight, a drag to our spirit. We were 
crippled, hindered, held down, carried lower by 
it, as a man swimming in deep water, who carries 
a useless weight. Put under foot, the same thing 
raises us up, and makes us stronger. The " stum- 
bling-block " becomes a " stepping-stone. " 

No doubt we have all known persons — children, 
or grown men and women — who seem always to 
be weakened and discouraged by any such shock 
as I have spoken of. If it is any personal grief 
and trouble, they make no effort to grapple with 
it, or to turn their thought firmly to something 
else that would give them strength. If it is any 
fault they are guilty of, their sorrow is a weak 
and empty sorrow, leaving them all the more apt 
to do just so next time : like a drunkard, who in 
his hours of remorse is most pitiful and abject in 
his self- humiliation and confession of guilt ; but 
at the next breath of temptation is the more apt 
to fall. 

What is the meaning of that shock, that trouble 
of conscience, that sharp sense of wrong ? 

It is as the sting of frost. It is as the pang of 
fire. It is as the pinch of poverty. The pain is 
meant to put us in the attitude, and give us the 
spirit, to resist ! It is by resistance that we are set 
on the road of recovery. There is a point where 
the frost benumbs us ; where the fire stupefies us ; 
where poverty makes men callous, indolent, and 



STEPPING-STONES. 243 

hopeless. But our very business is to stave it off ; 
never to come to that point ; to keep ourselves sen- 
sitive to the sting, open to the pain and shame, as 
the condition of a healthy resistance to it and a 
complete recovery from it. 

There are always the two ways to take. A man 
finds himself in debt, for instance; and for the 
present he sees no way out of debt. Now he may 
rack and torment himself — by toil, by self-denial, 
by all effort an honest man can make — to bring 
himself clear ; or he may slide along till the pain 
of the shock is over, and glide on smooth and eas;y 
waters into the gulf of insolvency and ruin. He 
has been tripped up — once, twice — by what 
seemed harmless indulgence in an appetite or a 
pleasure. He may go on, forget all about it, and 
drift on the smooth broad course to degradation 
and despair; or he may meet the thing manfully 
in the face, and accept his present smart as a heav- 
enly voice of warning. He cannot do both. 

He cannot do both ; and of the two the fatal way 
is almost sure to be the pleasanter and easier way 
at first. " For wide is the gate, and broad is the 
way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there 
be which go in thereat. Because straight is the 
gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto 
life, and few there be that find it. " The meaning 
of the moral experience is to put him in an atti- 
tude of resistance ; to set the wrong thing he has 
done sharply over against the right thing he means 
to do; to make the dead past his stepping-stone 
to a living future. 



THE BRIGHT SIDE. 

HPO listen to some of our evil prophets, one 
would think Religion itself was going to 
perish out of existence in the controversies of the 
clay. I do not think any such thing ; because to my 
mind the name " religion " means not any set of 
opinions, but simply the highest life of which the 
soul is capable. Nay, more : so far as the exist- 
ence of religion, in any form worth having, can be 
said to be staked on anything, it is on its ability 
to stand with the free and unfettered advance of 
thought in any direction open to the human mind. 
Honest opinion, whatever the shape it takes, is 
better for the soul's true life than insincere and 
cowardly opinion, however precious and sacred 
the form it clings to. 

Yery much of the gloom which darkens life to 
many persons is simply the shadow of unbelief — 
that unbelief which fails to see or know the bright 
side of life. This shadow will steal sometimes 
upon a mind of a very high order; it will even 
make a sort of fashion in literature or in society. 
The modern pessimist does not proclaim his creed 
by loud tirades against gross evils, or by sentimen- 
tal sympathy with the victims of a social wrong. 
He only strips off the disguises that cover men's 
real selfishness, jealousy, and greed. He only 



THE BRIGHT SIDE. 245 

shows how seeming goodness may be the cloak 
of villany at heart. It is half a confession, half 
an insinuation, that we, with all our virtuous emo- 
tions and our excellent intentions, are at bottom 
no better than the rest of the world. Perhaps 
so. But then this confession ought to go along 
with a very positive belief in goodness, with a 
real " hunger and thirst after righteousness ; " or 
else it may come to be a meaner hypocrisy and a 
more disastrous cant than the other. The cant of 
a Pharisee is at least decent and orderly, and on 
the side of virtue. The cant of a Cynic assails 
that boundary which human nature itself has set 
up for its defence between virtue and vice. 

And besides, it is a root of great bitterness in 
heart and life. What we call a genuine convic- 
tion of sin — if we are still old-fashioned enough 
to use the phrase — is really a strong conviction 
that there is something far better than we have 
now, or are now ; that it is within our reach, and 
we ought to reach it. Thus instead of deadening, 
it quickens and stimulates our sense of moral 
freedom. I suppose the highest joy one can feel 
is that generous joy which springs from his belief 
and love of something higher and better than him- 
self. Nothing makes him so strong as to feel that 
that better thing is within his reach, and to try 
for it. Without that, he is still in the low levels. 
With it, he is already on the upward track. To 
build on what we have — to mount from where we 
stand — to reach forth to that which is before — 
is the very end and aim of the religious life. 



246 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

It is curious, if we only think of it, how little the 
world we live in depends, for what it is itself, on 
anything we can do; how wholly it depends, for 
what it is to us, on what we think and feel and 
are. If the eye is single, the whole body is full 
of light, says Jesus. And then he goes on, almost 
in the same breath, to speak of the birds of the 
air and the lilies of the field as signs of our Heav- 
enly Father's care. " What ! " a naturalist who is 
only a naturalist might say; "these field-flowers 
that grow everywhere about ? ' that we trample 
under foot ? that we do all we can to get rid of 
when they grow like weeds among our corn ? that 
we find in the field to-day, and to-morrow cast into 
the oven for cheap fuel to bake our bread ? What ! 
these birds that build their nests everywhere and 
anywhere ? that pick up their food as they can and 
where they can ? that perish of starvation, or are 
cruelly stoned to death by boys, or are hawked at 
by owls and kites, and die miserably by many 
millions in every tempest ? Are these the signs, 
are these the objects of a protecting Providence ? " 

"Yes, even so," Jesus might have answered; 
and I think he would have said it very reverently 
and tenderly. " What skill of yours or mine could 
have spread the tints so on the petals of the wild 
flower ? brighter than Solomon in all his glory, 
yet cheap and common as grass-blades ! is all that 
feast of beauty to your eye to pass for nothing? 
Yes ! " he might have said. " See how curiously, 
how skilfully, nay, how tenderly, the little bird is 
fashioned for flight, and sheltered in its hidden 



THE BRIGHT SIDE. 247 

nest. See how all this bright world of sunshine 
and melody is set before it, as it were, to make 
its innocent heart glad during its brief life. Think 
how little it has to suffer, how little to be anxious 
about, how much to enjoy. And do not think it a 
hardship, either, that when it must perish — as we 
all must perish — to make room for those young 
broods which it loves far better than itself, it 
should be by one sudden tempest, by one sharp 
frost, by one stroke of the keen talons and the 
hungry beak, and it is all over, — not by the long 
misery of lingering pain. I tell you," he might 
add, "that not one sparrow falls to the ground 
without your Father ! " 

So Jesus might have explained the natural fact, 
and shown how even the dark side as well as the 
bright side of things illustrates the same all-em- 
bracing Providence. But it took the open eye, the 
reverent heart, the believing mind, to see it so. 
It took the light that was in him, the light he 
tried to kindle in them, to show the fact in its 
wider meaning. And where a mere lover of sci- 
ence might see only a blind, aimless, and cruel 
struggle for existence, this serener wisdom sees 
in the same fact a fresh illustration of the Divine 
care and skill that have so provided for the larg- 
est number the largest chance of life and joy. 



GOING FORWARD. 

T IFE begins always in the individual germ. 
See, we might say, how tenderly the Father 
of all seems to take his child by the hand, as it en- 
ters this strange path of life, and to lead it on, from 
slow first steps, to the wider and higher way ! Help- 
less, speechless, in its pitiful impotence, the baby 
lies — dazzled by the glare of light, stunned by the 
rush of noises upon its undistinguishing ear — the 
most forlorn and pitiable of creatures. But in that 
frail casket is hid the precious germ that will ripen 
into so rich and vast a life ! All things are given, 
as it were, for its instruction and help. As its 
sight steadies and strengthens, it reaches out for 
the universe as a plaything. It catches at the moon 
and stars, as if it would pull them from the sky 
in its baby grasp. All voices of human love and 
tenderness invite it forth; kind hands stronger 
than its own hold it up and lead it on. As a 
bird's nest, lined with softest down, screens the 
fledgling till it is ready to try its wings against 
the storm, so our atmosphere of soft indulgence 
broods about and nourishes the budding strength ; 
the Divine love is echoed in the tones and reflected 
in the loving eyes, that attend the frail unfolding 
life. 



GOING FORWARD. 249 

The first voluntary steps must take it out of that 
sweet Eden into a harsher air. The first conscious 
thought must break the charm of that blissful ig- 
norance. The first wakening of conscience to a 
higher life will most likely be the wakening of re- 
morse from the pungent after-taste of some forbid- 
den fruit. It is a long and weary way, between 
the ignorant innocence of early morning and the 
solemn calm repose of the silent night. But when 
the shades of that night begin to gather, and the 
promised hour of rest beckons after the heat and 
burden of the day, — then to most of us, I think, 
it will come as a grateful memory, that we have 
been led by a Hand we knew not, in a path of 
which we were not aware, to an end that was 
peacefuller and better, if not more smiling and 
radiant, than our wish had planned it out. It is 
not then the delusion of self-flattery, it is grateful 
acknowledgment of a Power not ourselves that has 
wrought with us for righteousness. That Power 
— the law of the spirit of life in us — did not work 
blindly and vainly, but by a counsel and a wisdom 
better than our own. And we learn to think as 
gratefully of the Heavenly Father then, as we 
think tenderly now of the human love which 
broods so pitifully, so watchfully, over the new- 
born babe. 

I say we may learn to think so. For it is not 
only a sentiment: it is also an attainment. It 
does not mean solution of the enigma of the uni- 
verse; it does not mean explanation of the dark 
things in human life. It means fidelity in our 



250 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

own appointed work ; it means patience in our own 
narrow way. It may be that our thoughts about the 
Infinite, and his ways toward us, are as vague, as 
dim, as unreal, as those of an infant respecting 
ours would be, if it could put them into words. 
It may be that we have tried every theory of the uni- 
verse which philosophers or pietists have framed, 
and have found them all alike to be less than 
nothing to us, and vanity. 

But the religious life does not promise us the 
solution of the enigma of the universe ; it does not 
promise us the interpretation of the mystery of our 
own lot. Its best fruit, very likely, will be not clear 
vision, and not triumphant faith: nothing better 
than that poor humble thing we call " the patience 
of hope." But then — "we are saved by hope;" 
and " hope maketh not ashamed ! " 

In our reading of the lessons of this life, I am 
not sure that we can get much beyond these simple 
words. Of course we can learn something — can 
learn much; and that learning is a joy, a privi- 
lege, and a delight. But all rests on mystery at 
bottom. A few steps, and we land in outer dark- 
ness. But see how it is in other things. The 
clearest-eyed science must be content to rest at 
last with the largest law that has yet been dis- 
closed: call it gravitation, call it affinity, call it 
persistence of force — there is no accounting for 
any one of them. Just so it is with the submis- 
sion of the religious mind to the highest law it 
knows of the inward life. 



RELIGION AND MODERN LIFE. 

"Friend, go up higher." 

/^UR sympathy runs out very quickly to the 
expression of strong feeling, so long as it 
is kept within certain bounds ; but is quickly set 
back if it goes beyond those bounds. When I was 
in Italy, many years ago, I found that I was soon 
hardened to and irritated by the practised beggar's 
whine, which seemed very pitiful at first; while 
the cry of a beggar child, or the street singing of 
the blind, brought pain to my heart and tears to 
my eyes in an instant. In one case the cry was, 
or seemed to be, sophisticated and unreal ; in the 
other, the strongest appeal to pity was in the dumb 
appeal of that most sad and piteous fact, blindness 
and poverty, most likely unpitied and uncared for. 
So the high-wrought rhetorical expression of feel- 
ing makes what Aristotle calls a " frigid " style, 
— cold from contrast, as Whately explains, like 
an empty fireplace on a chilly day. Now in no 
direction does the ardent expression of feeling out- 
run our sympathy sooner, than when it sets toward 
piety : which is, itself, an emotion that many ex- 
cellent people do not feel very strongly. And so 
the exposition of the higher life as a life of emo- 
tional piety gets unreal and dim; and is often, I 



252 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

fear, regarded at best with a good-humoured and 
tolerant contempt by many excellent people of the 
world. 

Religion, again, has suffered incalculably from 
being left to the interpreting of ascetics, recluses, 
valetudinarians, and poltroons. It is a dangerous 
slope, said Maurice, from " the spiritual man " to 
the sneak. Consider what a robust, out-door, 
wholesome thing is the religion we find in the Old 
Testament, — in such types as Abraham, the emi- 
grant Arab chieftain; in Samuel, the sternly up- 
right and vigorous magistrate; in David, the 
shepherd-boy, the freebooter, the hardy adventurer, 
the self-willed, hot-tempered, magnanimous, capri- 
cious, jealous, vindictive king ; in Isaiah, the king's 
counsellor, reckless in his passionate patriotism, 
sharp in his appeal to the popular conscience, the 
eloquent poet of a splendid future ! What a loss 
and descent it is when we come down to modern 
pietists ! None of those men were saints, or ever 
pretended or wished to be. Their religion was as 
natural a part of them as their delight of eye or 
ear, their wrath, or ambition, or pride; and it 
was what history has found worth preserving and 
remembering of them. 

So, too, religion was worth respecting, and com- 
manded worldly men's respect, in such men as the 
intrepid broad-hearted Luther; the patient, wary, 
courageous, and devoted Orange; the scheming, 
crafty, resolute, powerful Cromwell, — great forces, 
all of them, in times of great movement and 
change. Contrast with such men the puny and 



• RELIGION AND MODERN LIFE. 253 

sentimental religionists who to common thought 
represent the name now. They may be more 
clean of heart and free from guile than those 
strong and valiant natures: there is no need to 
disparage either the genuineness of their senti- 
ment, or the tender and sweet fidelity of their 
work. But their interpretation of the thing, taken 
alone, warps the great name of Religion into some- 
thing effeminate and unwholesome. What can the 
gentle recluse really know of the height and depth 
of those mighty forces which move the world, act- 
ing through the lives of strong and courageous 
men ? What can a conscience morbidly tender, or 
a mind scrupulously narrowed to a single view of 
the Divine life, know of those powerful currents 
that sweep their way through history, or of the 
higher Law written out in all organized life upon 
the globe ? What can he who habitually cowers 
in dread of the awful Judge, whose justice he dare 
not question and whose penalties his heart whis- 
pers him he too well deserves, — what can such a 
one know of the freedom, joy, courage, of the 
higher life ? Scarce any greater harm has been 
done to the name of Religion than to leave it to 
the expounding of such feeble-spirited and abject 
pietists as too often claim a monopoly of it. 

A like mischief — possibly even worse — has been 
done by putting the sphere of the higher life away 
from and outside of the present life. This cardi- 
nal error belongs alike to the pale ecclesiasticism 
of centuries ago, and to the timid epicureanism of 
modern days. It is wholly apart from the spirit 



254 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

and sense of the Bible it ignorantly appeals to — 
whose pages glow, wherever the Divine life is 
spoken of, with the glad light, and are braced 
with the conscious strength, and exult in the 
abounding freedom, of a spirit that comes from a 
higher source indeed, but makes the very joy and 
strength of this labour-laden and' sorrow-laden life 
that men live here. If in some downcast mood, or 
under stress of argument, Paul did say once, " If in 
this life only we have hope we are of all men most 
miserable," that one lapse from his habit of cheer- 
ful courage might well be pardoned, the outward 
conditions of this life being then so merciless and 
hard. But there is no such reason to be given 
now by those who misquote his words. There is 
nothing of it in the Old Testament — where the 
times were just as rough, but where all the glad- 
ness, strength, and hope of religion are for the act- 
ual here and now. And all that is strongest and 
sweetest in the New Testament, while it opens up 
the comforting vision of the glories of a world to 
come, at the same time glows and throbs with a 
present joy that is felt to be divine, and is linked 
in, naturally and continually, with the experience, 
the affection, the duty, of the present life. Reli- 
gion in those souls was felt not as a theatrical illu- 
mination reserved for some far-off holiday ; but as 
a kind of sunlight, which filled and brightened the 
whole horizon of men's natural life, as broadly as 
they could possibly feel or think or act. 

What narrowness — ludicrous, if we would but 
think of it — has been incurred by our modern 



RELIGION AND MODERN LIFE. 255 

habit of ghostly interpretation! Because some 
fervidly enthusiastic Jew had gone out once in 
holiday procession to welcome his King with the 
waving of palm-branches and the singing of patri- 
otic songs, to the sound of the best instrumental 
music of his day, and thought there could be noth- 
ing in heaven or earth so fine, and so composed an 
ardent " song of degrees " celebrating the event, 
— our children, at the end of two thousand or three 
thousand years, must be taught that Heaven is a 
place where they shall literally (if they are very 
good) play on golden harps, wave palm-branches, 
and sing psalms, to all eternity! till some poor 
child, in weariness at the thought of it, asks her 
mother, pitifully, if the Lord will not perhaps 
allow her, when she has been very good, to go away 
sometimes to the other place, where she may play 
with the naughty children Saturdays! To think 
of the grotesque cruelty, the real mockery and 
mischief of this thing ! 

The fact is — the more distinctly we see it the 
better — that Heaven cannot possibly be anything 
else to us than the culminating and idealizing of 
what we honestly love best and care most for, here ; 
Hell cannot possibly be anything else to us than 
the culminating and idealizing of what we honestly 
most dread and hate. The higher life and the 
lower, the highest life and the lowest, are thus in- 
tensely conceived as taking outward colour and 
form in the gates of pearl, the walls of porphyry 
and jasper, and the pure river of the water of life 
clear as crystal ; as realized to the senses in the 



256 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

flames and anguish, the stench and darkness, the 
brimstone fumes and throngs of fiends, that make 
up the dreadful imagery of the Pit. It is a vivid, 
intense, descriptive poetry — a gorgeous and fiery 
phantasmagory — a poet's idealizing of Good and 
Evil in their most vast, sublime, comforting, over- 
whelming shapes. 

If we compare the conditions of life now with 
those when that stupendous imagery was conceived, 
we are struck first of all by the immensely greater 
range of it in almost every direction, — particularly 
in the direction of knowledge, thought, and practi- 
cal power ; I might add, in visible splendour too. 
For example, it would have been impossible for an 
ancient Jew or early Christian, any more than 
for a Bulgarian peasant to-day, really to conceive 
a Paradise half so gorgeous as a Paris exposition, 
or an Omnipotence equal to the display in a 
Krupp's cannon-factory, or an Omnipresence equal 
to the electric telegraph, or an Omniscience to 
rival the actual attainments of modern know- 
ledge. We have in such things as these as much 
grander a scale of measurement in the mental life, 
as in our modern astronomy we have of the outer 
spheres; and we are not going to accept those 
comforting words, those glorious symbols of an- 
cient faith, in any sense more narrow relatively to 
us than they had to those who first gave shape to 
them for our instruction, our warning, or our true 
peace. 

It is the expanding, purifying, exalting, of what 
we do believe in and care for, not the painful 



RELIGION AND MODERN LIFE. 257 

effort to realize what we do not half believe in or 
care for at all, that is going to give back to the 
name of Religion its true honour among ourselves. 
I look about, to see where men find in reality that 
honest, sincere, and unselfish joy in living. And 
I find it not merely in the emotion, fellowship, 
living piety, and good works of professed religion- 
ists — though theirs is a sphere of life noblest and 
purest of all, which deserves its first place in our 
honour and desire. I find it also in the joy of 
widening Knowledge ; in the joy of the discovery 
of Truth; in the joy of creative -Art; in the joy 
of noble Music; in the joy of all earnest Work; 
in the joy of all higher Contemplation; in the 
stern joy of all strenuous Combat ; in the pure deep 
joy of all heroic Sacrifice. These all make part of 
the higher life of man. And not till Religion 
generously welcomes and enfolds them all, can 
her name receive the cordial honour, or her prom- 
ises win the desire or gratitude, of such hearts as 
those which beat around us now. 

I say, " unselfish joy. " It is quite too late, and 
the world has learned quite too much of the con- 
ditions of right living, to fall back like the old 
nature-religions on anything sensual, base, or 
cruel. Into that higher life can be admitted (in 
the words of the Apocalypse) "nothing that is 
cowardly, or distrustful, or abominable, or idola- 
trous, or unclean, or that loveth and maketh a lie. " 
All such " have their part in the lake which burn- 
etii with fire and brimstone " — whatever that may 
be — " which is the second death. " Morality does 

17 



258 POSITIVE RELIGION. 

not constitute religion : very far indeed from that. 
But morality lays down, with severe exactness, 
the foundation on which alone that higher life can 
rest. Morality prescribes, with sharp emphasis, 
that rule of conduct which is the only pass-word 
into the Celestial City. 

Here is the difference between our notion of the 
higher life and the thoughtless, gay, unmoral reli- 
gions of Pagan antiquity: whose ideal was the 
complete training, perfecting, developing of "the 
natural man ; " a worship of intellect and beauty, 
which descended to a riot of sense and lust and 
cruelty and greed. Christianity, with all its er- 
rors and the narrow understanding of its disciples, 
did set up a lasting barrier against that loose 
and lewd interpretation. It made, once for all, 
self-devotion and purity of heart a part of our 
ideal of human life ; a part of our conception of 
the Eternal life. It was necessary, perhaps, that 
that ideal, religiously conceived, should be par- 
tial, narrow, ghostly, other-worldly, for a season; 
since, in the tempest of human passion, it is more 
important that one shrine should be kept sacred 
and pure, however secluded, than that the better 
life should be spread out all at once, so widely 
and so thinly too as all to be presently dissolved 
away. 

That was necessary. But it is necessary, too, 
that in the vastly enlarged wealth, power, beauty, 
and in the wider humanities, of our modern life, 
those partialities, narrownesses, asceticisms, should 
be done awav; that Religion should be as real and 



RELIGION AND MODERN LIFE. 259 

vital a thing to us, with the vast spaces of our sky 
and the developed riches of our earth, as it was 
to those whose notion of the Lord's kingdom would 
be included in one of our counties, and whose 
dream of the splendours of Paradise would be out- 
matched by the wealth of a single city. Their 
limitations of thought can no longer confine and 
limit us. Let only the fervour, strength, and 
purity of their spirit guide and inspire our own 
aspiration to the Eternal Life ! 



THE END. 



Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. 

CHRISTIAN HISTORY 

IN ITS THREE GREAT PERIODS. 

By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, 

Late Lecturer on Ecclesiastical History in Harvard University. 



First Period. "EARLY CHRISTIANITY." — 

Topics: i. The Messiah and the Christ; 2. Saint Paul; 
3. Christian Thought of the Second Century ; 4. The Mind 
of Paganism ; 5. The Arian Controversy ; 6. Saint Augus- 
tine ; 7. Leo the Great; 8. Monasticism as a Moral Force; 

9. Christianity in the East ; 10. Conversion of the Barba- 
rians ; 11. The Holy Roman Empire; 12. The Christian 
Schools. 

Second Period. "THE MIDDLE AGE." — 
Topics: i. The Ecclesiastical System; 2. Feudal Society; 
3. The Work of Hildebrand ; 4. The Crusades ; 5. Chiv- 
alry ; 6.. The Religious Orders; 7. Heretics; 8. Scholastic 
Theology; 9. Religious Art; 10. Dante; 11. The Pagan 
Revival. 

Third Period. " MODERN PHASES." — Topics : 
1. The Protestant Reformation ; 2. The Catholic Reaction ; 
3. Calvinism ; 4. The Puritan Commonwealth ; 5. Port 
Royal ; 6. Passage from Dogma to Philosophy ; 7. English 
Rationalism; 8. Infidelity in France ; 9. The German Critics; 

10. Speculative Theology ; 11. The Reign of Law. 

Each volume contains a Chronological Outline of its Period, with a 
full Table of Contents and Index, and may be ordered separately. 

Volume I. (" Early Christianity ") is, with a few additions, — the most 
important being a descriptive List of Authorities, — the same that was 
published in 1880, under the title, " Fragments of Christian History." 
3 volumes. i6mo. Cloth. Price, $1.25 per volume. 

Mr. Allen's writings, "Christian History in its Three Great Periods," 3 
vols., $3.75 ; " Hebrew Men and Times from the Patriarchs to the Messiah," 
#1.50; "Our Liberal Movement in Theology chiefly as shown in Recollec- 
tions of the History of Unitarianism in New England," ffi.25, may be had, 
the five volumes, for #5.50. 

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Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. 

*■ • • 

HEBREW MEN AND TIMES 

FROM THE 

patriarchs to tf)e jWe&gfefh 

By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, 
Lecturer on Ecclesiastical History in Harvard University. 

New Edition, with an Introduction on the results of recent Old 
Testament criticism. Chronological Outline and Index. i6mo. 
Price, $1.50. 

Topics, i. The Patriarchs; 2. Moses; 3. The Judges; 
4. David ; 5. Solomon ; 6. The Kings ; 7. The Law ; 8. The 
Prophets; 9. The Captivity ; 10. The Maccabees; 11. The Alex- 
andrians ; 12. The Messiah. 

Extract from the Preface: "... There seemed room and need of a clear, 
brief sketch, or outline ; one that should spare the details and give the re- 
sults of scholarship ; that should trace the historical sequences and connec- 
tions, without being tangled in questions of mere erudition, or literary 
discussions, or theological polemics ; that should preserve the honest inde- 
pendence of scholarly thought, along with the temper of Christian faith ; 
that should not lose from sight the broad perspective of secular history, 
while it should recognize at each step the hand of ' Providence as manifest 
in Israel.' Such a want as this the present volume aims to meet." 

Rev. O. B. Frothingham in the Christian Examiner. 

" We shall be satisfied to have excited interest enough in the theme to induce 
readers to take up Mr. Allen's admirable book and trace through all the richness 
and variety of his detail the eventful history of this Hebrew thought. His pages, 
with which we have no fault to find save the very uncommon fault of being too 
crowded and too few, will throw light on many things which must be utterly dark 
now to the unlearned mind ; they will also revive the declining respect for a ven- 
erable people, and for a faith to which we owe much more than some of us suspect. 
For, however untrammelled Mr. Allen's criticism may be, his thought is always 
serious and reverential. And the reader of his pages, while confessing that their 
author has cleared away many obstructions in the way of history, will confess also 
that he has only made freer the access to the halls of faith. There is no light or 
loose or unbecoming sentence in the volume. There is no insincere paragraph. 
There is no heedless line. And this perhaps is one of the greatest charms of the 
book ; for it is rare indeed that both intellect and heart are satisfied with the 
same letters." 

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Roberts Brothers Publications. 

OUR LIBERAL MOVEMENT 
IN THEOLOGY, 

Chiefly as shown in Recollections of the History of Urri- 
tarianism in New England. Being a Closing Course of 
Lectures given in the Harvard Divinity School. 

By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, 

Lecturer on Ecclesiastical History in Harvard University. 

Second edition. i6mo. Cloth. Price $1.25. 



" It is a review of the history and antecedents of New England Unita- 
rianism, interspersed with interesting personal reminiscences, and ending 
with an appreciation of the tendencies of modern liberal theology and a 
forecast of the future." — New York Tribune. 

" The first five of these lectures give a very readable and interesting 
sketch and criticism of the history of Unitarianism in New England. 
These are followed by three lectures, the subjects of which are, ' A Scien- 
tific Theology,' ' The Religion of Humanity,' and ' The Gospel of Liberal- 
ism.' The book is a valuable and instructive study of what Unitarianism 
is, and how it came to be what it is." — New Englander, 

" The chapters are well composed and well informing, and the style of 
the writer is clear and engaging. He writes of that in which he believes, 
and does not allow himself to drift far from his subject. The work consti- 
tutes a very fair and convenient hand-book on the Unitarian movement, 
certainly an historical movement, and one which has left its impress upon 
the religious thinking of all denominations. We welcome the book as a just 
and entertaining presentation of a form of belief which has found more or 
less acceptance among us." — Standard, Chicago. 



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Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. 



Outline of Christian History. 

A. D. 50-1880. 

By JOSEPH HENRY ALLEN, 

Author of "Hebrew Men and Times," " Christian History in its Three 
Great Periods" " Our Liberal Movetnent in Theology" etc. 

i6mo, Cloth. Price, 75 Cents. 

This "Outline" is designed by Mr. Allen, primarily, as a manual 
for class instruction. It is printed in different sizes of type, and the 
twelve chapters are to be studied as so many lessons, using only the por- 
tions in the larger type, — in which the general scheme or course of events 
are clearly stated, — after which particular periods may be studied in more 
detail. It is a very valuable epitome, not a history, and will be found a 
useful guide to more extended study of Christian history. The topics 
selected as lessons are the Messianic Period, the Martyr Age, Age of Con- 
troversies and Creeds, the Church and Barbarians, the Church and Feudal- 
ism, Dawn of the Modern Era, the Reformations, Wars of Religion, the 
English Puritans, Modern Christianity, the Nineteenth Century, and an 
Index of Topics and Names. — Journal of Education. 

The little work, as its title indicates, is designed as a manual for class 
instruction on the origin, growth, and principles of Christianity from its 
foundation to the present time. It consists of twelve chapters, and each 
chapter is devoted to one particular epoch of Christian history. It is one 
of the most carefully and skilfully compiled volumes of religious history we 
have yet seen, and will be found invaluable to students, old as well as 
young. — Saturday Evening Gazette. 

It would seem impossible to cover such a space with so limited a 
manual, but it is happily and ably accomplished by Mr. Allen. His 
three or four historical compendiums of ecclesiastical events are well known. 
The present handbook forms an admirable text-book for a class of young 
people in ecclesiastical history, and will afford to any reader a good idea of 
the progress of the Christian Church, with its most noted names and de- 
nominational families, during the whole period from the first century down 
to our days. There seems to be a marked fairness in the condensed sketches 
of men of different sects and their special religious movements. It is cer- 
tainlv a useful little manual. — Zion's Herald. 



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by the Publishers, 

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